THE   LIFE   AND   TIMES   OF   TENNYSON 


, 

The  Life  and  Times 
of  'i'ennyson 

[From   1809  to    1850] 

BY 
THOMAS  R.  LOUNSBURY 

New  Haven:    Yale  University  Press 

London:   Humphrey  Milford 

Oxford  University  Press 

MDCCCCXV 

^ ^ 

^£ 


3A 


Copyright,  1915 

BY 

Yale  University  Press 


First  printed,  December,  1915,  1000  copies 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.     Tennyson's  Early  Years 1 

II.     Poems  by  Two  Brothers 41 

III.     University  Life 63 

rV-VI.     The  Literary  Situation  in  the  Transi- 
tion Period: 
Part   One:   Critical  Literature   of  the 

Period 94 

Part  Two :  Surviving  Eeputations  of  the 

Georgian  Era 128 

Part  Three:  Popular  Authors  of  the 

Period 163 

VII.     The  Poems  of  1830 205 

VIIL     Christopher  North's  Review  .      ...     227 
IX-X.     The  Annuals : 

Part  One:  The  Origin  and  History  of 

the  Annuals 245 

Part  Two:  Tennyson's  Contributions  to 

the  Annuals 265 

XL     The  Poems  of  1832 279 

XII.     Lockhart's     Review     of     Tennyson's 

Second  Volume 310 

XIII.     The    Ten   Years'    Silence— First   Half 

(1832-1837) 325 


328246 


vi  CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

XIV.     The  Ten  Years'  Silence— Second  Half 

(1837-1842) 357 

XV.     The  Poems  of  1842 378 

XVI.     Reception  of  the  Poems  of  1842  ...  416 
XVII.    American  Reception  of  the  Poems  of 

1842      .      .- 446 

XVIII.     Christopher  North's  Later  Attacks  on 

Tennyson 465 

XIX.     Tennyson's     Pension     and     Bulwer's 

Attack 497 

XX.     The  Princess 530 

XXL    Poet  Laureate 568 

XXII.     Arthur  Henry  Hallam 589 

XXIII.     In  Memoriam 616 


INTEODUCTION 

Professor  Lounsbury's  name,  I  suppose,  is  most 
closely  associated  by  the  public  with,  his  studies  in 
Chaucer  and  Shakespeare.  His  literary  taste,  how- 
ever, was  singularly  catholic.  Pope  and  Dryden,  for 
example,  appealed  to  him  strongly  because  of  their 
pugnacity  and  the  keenness  of  their  satire.  Their 
poems  he  knew  intimately,  and  he  often  quoted  pas- 
sages from  them  in  conversation,  not  always  accu- 
rately but  rather  by  way  of  a  paraphrase  which  gave 
new  edge  to  an  epigram.  Of  later  poets  the  ones  he 
read  most  were  Byron,  Browning,  and  Tennyson. 
From  any  one  of  the  three,  he  would  repeat,  when  in 
the  mood  for  it,  long  stretches  running  to  hundreds 
of  verses.  Among  the  poems  of  Tennyson  which  he 
sometimes  recited  were  'Locksley  Hall,'  the  'Ode  on 
the  Death  of  the  Duke  of  Wellington,'  and  parts  of 
'Maud,'  'The  Princess,'  and  'In  Memoriam.'  Many 
of  the  quotations  in  this  volume  were  first  written  out 
from  memory. 

This  admiration  for  Tennyson  began  in  youth  and 
continued  through  a  long  life.  It  was  his  habit  when 
a  schoolboy  to  clip  from  the  newspaper  any  new 
production  of  the  poet  and  paste  it  in  a  scrapbook, 
first,  I  daresay,  committing  the  lines  to  memory;  and 
the  most  notable  essay  that  he  wrote  while  in  college 
was  a   defence   of  'Maud'   against  hostile  criticism. 


viii  INTRODUCTION 

Long  afterwards,  when  the  second  'Locksley  HalP 
made  its  appearance,  he  contributed  to  'The  New 
Englander'  a  most  illuminating  contrast  and  compari- 
son between  this  poem  and  the  one  of  sixty  years  before 
bearing  the  same  name.  The  last  lectures  which  he 
gave  at  Yale,  a  decade  ago,  were  on  Tennyson  and  the 
poet's  early  contemporaries.  Always,  the  man  who 
had  lived  through  the  greater  part  of  the  Victorian 
era  set  himself  squarely  against  the  wave  of  cheap 
depreciation  which  at  times  threatened  to  overwhelm 
Tennyson.  Though  he  admitted  the  poet's  limitations, 
he  insisted  upon  his  greatness. 

It  was  while  Professor  Lounsbury  was  in  the  midst 
of  his  lectures  that  he  planned  a  literary  biography 
of  Tennyson.  He  never  expected  to  cover  the  poet's 
entire  career,  but  he  hoped  that  he  might  come  down 
to  the  publication  of  'The  Idylls  of  the  lOng.'  When 
compelled  to  stop  he  had  reached  'In  Memoriam,' 
though  he  had  collected  most  of  his  materials  for  the 
subsequent  decade.  In  no  "s^ase  was  his  book  intended 
as  a  rival  to  other  biographies  of  the  poet,  least  of  all 
as  a  rival  to  the  'Memoir'  of  Tennyson  by  the  poet's 
son.  "That  work,"  Professor  Lounsbury  remarks  in 
notes  which  he  had  made  towards  a  preface,  "must 
always  be  the  final  authority  on  the  points  it  deals 
wdth  directly.  All  other  biographies  are  under 
obligations  to  it.  My  own  obligations  are  sufficiently 
shown  by  the  numerous  facts  borrowed  from  it,  which 
are  duly  acknowledged  on  page  after  page."  At  the 
same  time,  he  goes  on  to  say:  "It  is  a  matter  of 
supreme  difficulty  for  one  who  is  united  to  a  man  by 


INTRODUCTION  ix 

the  closest  of  personal  ties  to  tell  satisfactorily  the 
story  of  his  life.  Especially  is  this  so  in  the  case  of 
a  son.  He  cannot  say  anything  in  censure.  Coming 
from  him,  it  would  seem  an  act  of  impiety  towards  a 
dead  man.  Equally  he  cannot  say  anything  in  praise, 
even  that  which  all  the  rest  of  the  world  would  feel  to 
be  justly  due.  It  would  be  attributed  in  his  case  to 
filial  affection,  not  to  the  conclusion  of  an  impartial 
judge.  Hence  whatever  appreciation  he  introduces 
must  come  from  the  outside.  Others  must  be  brought 
forward  to  say  for  him  what  he  cannot  say  for  himself 
without  being  subjected  to  malevolent  criticism.  Such 
a  method  of  conveying  an  estimate  is  always  unsat- 
isfactory." This  comment  on  the  procedure  of  the 
poet's  son  presents  clearly  Professor  Lounsbury's 
point  of  view.  Free  from  the  trammels  of  relation- 
ship, he  will  always  speak  out  as  an  unbiassed  critic 
in  just  praise  and  blame.  This  is  what  he  did  years 
ago  in  his  'Life  of  James  Fenimore  Cooper.'  In  no 
other  way  can  one  arrive  at  a  true  appraisal  of  a 
writer.  Professor  Lounsbury's  studies  may  be 
regarded  as  supplementary  to  the  '  Memoir '  by  Hallam 
Tennyson. 

The  title  which  the  author  chose  for  his  book  was 
'The  Life  and  Times  of  Tennyson.'  Had  the  work 
been  brought  nearer  to  completion,  this  would  have 
more  properly  described  its  scope  than  it  does  now. 
Still,  even  in  that  case,  there  would  have  been  need 
of  a  brief  explanation.  It  was  not  Professor  Louns- 
bury's purpose  to  relate  anew  those  well-kno^vn  inci- 
dents in  the  poet's  life  which  may  be  easily  found 


X  INTRODUCTION 

elsewhere.  Wliat  he  ever  kept  in  mind  was  the 
literary  career  of  Tennyson.  From  many  sources, 
some  of  them  very  obscure,  he  drew  such  personal 
incidents  as  would  contribute  directly  to  the  end  he 
had  in  view.  This  is  true  even  of  the  chapter  on 
Tennyson's  youth.  Most  of  the  material  that  went 
into  those  pages  has  a  direct  bearing  on  the  poet's 
future  career.  It  was  a  difficult  chapter  to  write,  for 
the  boyhood  of  Tennyson  has  been  passed  over  lightly 
by  all  who  have  written  upon  him.  Indeed,  none  of 
them  seems  to  have  known  much  about  it.  No  more 
was  it  Professor  Lounsbury's  intention  to  make  a  full 
survey  of  *'the  times"  embraced  by  the  poet's  eighty 
years.  That  would  have  been  a  labor  alike  valueless 
and  impossible.  As  the  reader  will  see,  he  has  con- 
fined his  story  to  what  immediately  concerned  Tenny- 
son. So  much  and  no  more  of  ''the  times"  was 
admitted.  Accordingly  certain  great  names  of  the 
Victorian  era  either  are  casually  mentioned  or  are 
rendered  conspicuous  by  their  absence.  They  have 
to  give  place  to  men  who  exerted  a  measurable 
influence  upon  the  varying  fortunes  of  the  poet's 
literary  career.  These  men  were  obviously  not  Brown- 
ing and  Matthew  Arnold;  they  were,  for  the  early 
period,  ''Christopher  North,"  John  Gibson  Lockhart, 
and  scores  of  other  reviewers  whom  the  world  has  long 
since  consigned  to  oblivion.  The  opinions  of  these 
critics  then  swayed  the  public  for  or  against  an  author. 
This  is  the  reason  why  many  of  them  are  given  a  new 
lease  of  life  here.  In  a  note  summarizing  his  plan,  I 
find  Professor  Lounsbury  saying:    "I  wish  to  bring 


INTRODUCTION  xi 

out  clearly  not  only  what  took  place  in  the  life  of  the 
poet  during  the  period  in  question,  but  the  situation 
in  which  he  found  himself  as  regards  literature,  the 
hostility  which  he  encountered  at  the  outset  of  his 
career,  and  the  circumstances  which  brought  it  about 
and  the  influences  that  were  at  work  both  to  create  it 
and  to  dissipate  it.  This  is  a  field  which  has  been 
touched  upon  by  none  of  his  biographers,  or  if  touched 
upon  merely  alluded  to."  Though  Professor  Louns- 
bury  was  compelled  to  shorten  the  period  he  once  had 
in  mind,  he  has  here  depicted  Tennyson's  long  struggle 
for  recognition  down  to  the  great  triumph  of  'In 
Memoriam. '  It  is  the  part  of  the  poet's  career  that 
has  the  greatest  human  interest. 

An  account  of  how  Tennyson  impressed  his  con- 
temporaries involved,  first  of  all,  a  consideration  of 
the  critical  literature  of  the  time.  *'I  have  gone  over," 
says  Professor  Lounsbury,  ''every  article  of  Tenny- 
son which  appeared  in  any  quarterly,  monthly,  or 
weekly  of  importance,  whether  in  England  or  America, 
from  1830  to  1855.  Nor  have  I  confined  myself  to 
reviews  which  dealt  directly  with  the  poet.  There  is 
no  article  dealing  with  the  literary  situation  or  with 
the  other  writers  of  the  period  which  I  have  not  read 
with  more  or  less  care."  It  is  quite  e\ddent  that  these 
statements  may  be  extended,  mth  some  reserves,  to 
the  daily  newspapers  which  contained  literary  notices. 
In  these  unworked  mines.  Professor  Lounsbury  dis- 
covered fresh  material  for  his  volume.  Sometimes  he 
used  to  grumble  at  the  labor,  but  in  his  very  heart  he 
thoroughly  enjoyed  it.    Time  often  renders  old  views 


xii  INTRODUCTION 

and  old  opinions  so  absurd  that  they  become  a  source 
of  delight  to  a  man  having  Professor  Lounsbury's 
extraordinary  sense  of  humor.    He  finds  ''men  extolled 
to  the  skies  whose  names  are  now  forgotten,  and  men 
contemptuously  decried  whom  the  world  now  cherishes 
as  the  greatest  representatives  of  their  age. ' '    Through 
all  this  critical  literature  Professor  Lounsbury  slowly 
ploughed  his  way.     Some  readers,  he  apprehended, 
might  object  to  his  frequent  extracts  from  it.     Them 
he  would  console  by  declaring  that  he  had  refrained, 
out  of  regard  to  their  sensibilities,  from  quoting  scores 
of  passages  which  he  might  have  adduced  to  illustrate 
further  the  views  once  current  concerning  Tennyson. 
By  way  of  parenthesis,  it  may  be  observed  that 
Professor  Lounsbury  placed  a  very  low  estimate  on 
the  intrinsic  value  of  the  criticism  contemporary  with 
the  poet.    After  admitting  that  he  has  met  with  some 
articles  still  worth  reading,  he  goes  on  to  say:    "The 
chief  impression  produced  upon  me  by  them  taken  as 
a  whole  is  the  general  worthlessness  of  most  contem- 
porary criticism.    Especially  is  this  true  of  works  of 
the  imagination.    When  it  comes  to  the  description  of 
matters  of  fact,  superior  knowledge  may  point  out 
errors  of  detail,  but  where  taste  and  culture  are  the 
leading  factors,  we  never  have  much  more  than  an 
expression  of  the  reviewer's  likes  and  dislikes.  .  .  . 
After  a  careful  examination  of  the  criticism  which 
Tennyson  received  during  the  twenty-five  years  under 
consideration,  it  is  well  within  bounds  to  declare  that 
nine  tenths  of  it  is  not  worth  the  paper  on  which  it 
was  written,  and  that  no  small  share  of  this  nine  tenths 


INTRODUCTION  xiii 

is  discreditable  to  the  men  who  wrote  it  and  to  the 
periodicals  in  which  it  appeared."  Why,  then,  it  may 
be  asked,  should  one  consider  it?  Why  disturb  the 
dead  ?  Because  in  contemporary  criticism  and  nowhere 
else  lies  the  literary  biography  of  Tennyson. 

While  engaged  upon  this  book,  Professor  Louns- 
bury's  eyes,  never  very  good,  failed  him  for  close  and 
prolonged  work.  At  best  he  could  depend  upon  them 
for  no  more  than  two  or  three  hours  a  day.  Sometimes 
he  could  not  depend  upon  them  at  all.  That  he  might 
not  subject  them  to  undue  strain,  he  acquired  the  habit 
of  writing  in  the  dark.  Night  after  night,  using  a 
pencil  on  coarse  paper,  he  would  sketch  a  series  of 
paragraphs  for  consideration  in  the  morning.  This 
was  almost  invariably  his  custom  in  later  years. 
Needless  to  say,  these  rough  drafts  are  difficult  reading 
for  an  outsider.  Though  the  lines  could  be  kept 
reasonably  straight,  it  was  impossible  for  a  man 
enveloped  in  darkness  to  dot  an  i  or  to  cross  a  t. 
Moreover,  many  words  were  abbreviated,  and  numer- 
ous sentences  were  left  half  written  out.  Every  detail, 
however,  was  perfectly  plain  to  the  author  himself. 
With  these  detached  slips  of  paper  and  voluminous 
notes  before  him,  he  composed  on  a  typewriter  his 
various  chapters,  putting  the  paragraphs  in  logical 
sequence.  His  next  step  was  to  subject  his  typewritten 
copy  to  extensive  revision  with  pen  and  ink.  Subse- 
quently he  had  a  fair  copy  made  for  him  by  one  more 
expert  in  manipulating  the  typewriter.  Nor  did 
composition  end  there.  Besides  having  highly  devel- 
oped  the   instinct   of   the   literary   artist.   Professor 


xiv  INTRODUCTION 

Lounsbury  strove  at  all  times  for  perfect  accuracy. 
Before  letting  his  manuscript  finally  go  to  the  printer, 
he  went  over  it  again  with  extreme  care,  modifying 
where  necessary  his  statements  of  fact,  and  re- 
phrasing many  sentences  in  order  to  gain  the  effects 
he  aimed  to  produce.    Such  was  his  usual  procedure. 

It  is  accordingly  to  be  lamented  that  none  of  the 
chapters  printed  here  received  Professor  Lounsbury 's 
final  revision.  All  but  three  of  them,  however,  had 
reached  the  stage  of  the  second  typewritten  copy ;  and 
on  several  of  these  he  had  indicated  some  of  the 
alterations  which  he  wished  to  make;  but  he  had  not 
proceeded  far  with  this  work — in  no  case  through  an 
entire  chapter.  Whenever  it  was  clear  just  what  he 
desired,  I  have  made  the  emendations;  otherwise  I 
have  ventured  upon  no  change  except  where  a  wrong 
word  had  evidently  slipped  into  the  text,  or  where  a 
quotation  was  not  quite  literally  given.  Of  the  three 
remaining  chapters  the  fourteenth  was  nearly  ready 
for  the  second  typewritten  copy,  but  was  being  with- 
held for  additions  the  nature  of  which  is  not  apparent. 
The  first  chapter,  which  deals  with  Tennyson's  youth, 
was  in  a  less  satisfactory  condition.  Several  of  the 
paragraphs  Professor  Lounsbury  planned  to  modify 
and  reconstruct  in  the  light  of  further  study ;  and  the 
views  which  he  illustrates  near  the  close  on  the 
precocity  of  great  poets  were  not  fully  developed 
there.  Indeed,  the  chapter,  as  he  left  it,  broke  off  at 
the  beginning  of  a  sentence.  In  order  to  give  an 
appearance  of  completeness  to  this  chapter,  I  have 
transferred  to  it  a  few  passages  from  one  that  comes 


INTRODUCTION  xv 

midway  in  the  book.  Except  for  this  and  a  few  minor 
corrections,  it  was  necessary  to  let  this  chapter  stand 
in  its  incomplete  state.  The  greatest  perplexity  arose 
over  what  to  do  with  the  last  chapter — the  one  on 
'In  Memoriam.'  With  the  theme  of  this  poem  Pro- 
fessor Lounsbury's  mind  was  filled  during  the  last 
weeks  of  his  life.  Whenever  his  health  permitted,  he 
wrote  out  various  paragraphs  in  pencil,  and  he  had 
begun  to  organize  them  into  a  whole  when  the  end 
came.  Much  that  he  designed  to  say  about  *In 
Memoriam'  the  reader  ^svill  find  in  this  chapter  as  I 
have  attempted  to  piece  it  together ;  and  some  passages 
will  as  surely  be  found  there  which  would  have  been 
discarded  had  Professor  Lounsbury  lived  to  complete 
it.  Most  of  all,  his  friends  will  miss  those  remarks  on 
the  poem  which  they  have  heard  from  him  in  conver- 
sation and  which  he  intended  to  incorporate  into  this 
or  a  succeeding  chapter.  There  exist  also  partial 
outlines  for  chapters  on  the  Wellington  'Ode'  and  on 
'  Maud ' ;  but  they  are  too  faint  and  uncertain  to  follow. 
They  contain,  however,  certain  observations  of  a 
general  nature  which  I  have  inserted  near  the  end  of 
the  chapter  on  'In  Memoriam.' 

In  preparing  the  manuscript  for  the  press,  I  have 
received  much  aid  from  Miss  Helen  McAfee,  who  has 
verified  the  quotations.  Mr.  Andrew  Keogh  of  the 
Yale  University  Library  has  kindly  read  all  the  proofs, 
and  has  super^dsed  the  preparation  of  the  index.  For 
myself,  I  have  to  say  that  this  last  book  of  Professor 
Lounsbury's  is  here  presented  to  the  public  as  nearly 
as  possible  in  the  form  which  in  my  opinion  he  would 


xvi  INTRODUCTION 

have  desired.  Nothing  that  he  ever  wrote  better  dis- 
plays his  remarkable  qualities  as  a  literary  historian, 
his  brilliant  wit  and  humor,  and  that  mastery  of  style 
which  places  him  among  the  foremost  prose  writers 
of  recent  times. 

Wilbur  L.  Cross. 
Yale  University,  September,  1915. 


THE   LIFE   AND   TIMES   OF   TENNYSON 


CHAPTER  I 
TENNYSON'S  EAKLY  YEARS 

The  county  of  Lincoln,  the  second  in  size  of  the  Eng- 
lish shires,  is,  so  far  as  about  one  third  of  its  area  is 
concerned,  a  county  of  marshes  and  fens.  These  two 
words,  however,  as  there  employed,  hardly  convey  to 
the  reader  in  this  country  the  idea  that  he  would  be 
likely  to  entertain.  They  mean  not  tracts  of  land 
covered  partially  or  wholly  "wdth  water,  but  cultivated 
soil  reclaimed  in  one  case  from  the  sea  and  in  the 
other  from  the  overflow  of  streams.  Accordingly  they 
are  not  marshes  and  fens  in  the  strict  sense  of  the 
terms.  They  are  level  fields  separated  from  each 
other  not  by  fences  or  hedges,  but  by  ditches  and 
dykes.  The  so-called  marsh  in  the  neighborhood  of 
Tennyson's  boyhood  home  was  a  belt,  from  five  to  ten 
miles  broad,  of  rich  alluvial  soil,  stretching  along  the 
coast  from  the  upper  course  of  the  Humber  River  to 
the  neighborhood  of  Wainfleet,  and  protected  from  the 
ocean  by  sand  dunes  heaped  up  by  the  winds  and 
waves.  A  few  miles  to  the  south  of  the  place  of  his 
birth  lay  the  much  vaster  fen  country  of  the  shire. 

The  surface  of  the  country  is  for  the  most  part  a 
great  plain.  Yet  in  contrast  to  its  ordinarily  level  char- 
acter there  run  through  it,  in  the  general  direction  of 
north  and  south,  two  bold  ranges  of  calcareous  hills, 


3       LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

which  rise  in  places  to  the  height  of  two  or  three  thou- 
sand feet.  The  range  to  the  west  is  called  the  Cliffs, 
that  to  the  east  the  Wolds.  The  latter  extends  from 
Barton-on-Hiimber  to  Spilsby.  Towards  its  southern 
extremity  and  situated  between  low  hills,  lies  the  vil- 
lage of  Somersby.  It  is  rather  entitled  to  the  designa- 
tion of  hamlet.  It  is  a  very  small  place  now,  and  such 
it  seems  to  have  been  always.  In  fact,  it  is  too  small 
to  be  found  upon  any  but  the  largest  maps ;  early  in  the 
nineteenth  century  it  contained  not  many  more  than 
half  a  hundred  inhabitants.  At  that  time  the  rector  of 
the  parish  was  the  Reverend  George  Clayton  Tenny- 
son. He  was  a  man  of  lofty  stature,  of  great  physical 
strength,  and  of  vn.de  interests  and  tastes  in  many 
different  directions.  He  paid  attention  to  poetry,  to 
painting,  to  music,  and  to  architecture.  He  designed 
and  built  as  an  addition  to  the  rectory  a  Gothic- 
vaulted  dining-room,  where  on  winter  evenings  his 
family  gathered  and  spent  the  time  in  games  and  music 
and  readings  from  favorite  authors.  In  the  rear  of  the 
house  was  the  lawn  w^hich  sloped  down  to  the  garden, 
along  whose  edge  ran  the  little  brook  which  played  no 
unimportant  part  in  the  life  of  the  children.  Adjoin- 
ing the  garden  was  the  orchard. 

George  Clayton  Tennyson  had  married  Elizabeth 
Fytche,  the  daughter  of  the  vicar  of  Louth.  Twelve 
children  were  the  fruit  of  this  union.  Of  these  eight 
were  sons.  The  first-born,  George,  died  the  year  of 
his  birth.  Of  the  eleven  others,  the  eldest  was  Fred- 
erick, born  in  1807,  the  second  Charles,  born  in  1808, 
and  the  third  Alfred,  who  was  born  in  1809.    Unlike 


TENNYSON'S  EAELY  YEAKS  3 

the  father  all  the  children,  with  a  single  exception, 
passed  the  threescore  and  ten  years  allotted  to  man's 
life  on  earth.  Some  of  them  approached  fourscore 
and  several  passed  that  mark.  *'The  Tennysons 
never  die, ' '  was  the  almost  despairing  cry  of  that  one 
of  the  sisters  who  was  engaged  to  Arthur  Hallam,  in 
the  midst  of  the  utter  prostration  of  mind  and  body 
which  followed  the  death  of  her  lover.  Tennyson  him- 
self had  passed  by  two  months  his  eighty-third  birth- 
day at  his  death,  and  five  of  his  brothers  and  sisters 
sur^^ved  him,  one  of  them,  Frederick,  the  oldest  of  all. 
One  of  the  petty  controversies  connected  with  the 
poet's  life  has  arisen  as  to  the  exact  date  of  his  birth. 
In  nearly  all  of  the  later  accounts  it  is  put  dowTi  as 
having  occurred  on  the  sixth  of  August.  Tennyson 
himself  asserted  that  it  took  place  on  the  fifth.  His 
testimony  to  that  effect  is  given  by  Canon  Rawnsley 
to  whom  it  came  from  the  poet  directly.  "I  had  it," 
wrote  the  canon,  ''from  Lord  Tennyson  himself  that, 
though  the  6th  is  popularly  put  down  as  the  date  of  his 
birth,  it  really  took  place  a  few  minutes  before  mid- 
night of  the  5th.  "^  In  spite  of  his  necessary  presence 
on  the  occasion  his  independent  testimony  cannot  be 
deemed  of  much  value,  certainly  it  is  not  conclusive. 
At  that  time  he  could  not  be  expected  to  have  any 
recollection  of  the  event,  even  if  in  it  he  inevitably  bore 
a  particularly  prominent  part.  But  according  to  the 
advocates  of  this  date,  his  statement  is  borne  out  by 
the  evidence  of  one  much  better  informed.     In  their 

1' Memories  of  the  Tennysons,'  by  H.  D.  Rawnsley,  1900,  p.  3, 


4       LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

opinion  the  father  labored  under  the  same  impression 
as  the  son.  Tennyson's  baptism  took  place  on  the 
eighth  of  August.  The  record  of  the  fact  appears  in 
the  parish  register  written  in  the  rector's  own  hand. 
Under  the  date  mentioned  there  is  the  following 
entry : 

Alfred,  son  of  George  Clayton  and  Elizabeth  Tennyson 
bom  August  5  th. 

Against  this  view  the  advocates  of  the  later  date 
maintain  that  the  fifth  is  due  to  a  misreading  in  the 
parish  register.  This  assertion  was  made  long  ago 
while  the  poet  was  still  alive  by  one  who  professed  to 
have  examined  with  the  greatest  care  the  father's 
entry.  According  to  his  account  the  6  had  been  mis- 
taken for  a  5,  "the  top  of  the  back  stroke  being  some- 
what square  and  pointing  to  the  right,  and  the  ink  at 
the  back,  or  left,  of  the  loop  is  rather  faint ;  but  under 
a  magnifier  it  can  be  traced  through  all  the  figure."^ 
At  all  events  this  date  has  been  adopted  in  what  may 
be  called  the  official  life  of  the  poet.  The  fact  seems 
to  be  that  he  was  born  about  midnight,  and  so  his  birth 
could  properly  be  assigned  to  either  the  fifth  or  the 
sixth  day.  Still,  as  there  has  now  come  to  be  a  pretty 
general  agreement  on  the  adoption  of  the  later  date, 
that  will  doubtless  continue  to  be  considered  as  his 
birthday. 

In  1832,  Arthur  Hallam,  visiting  the  home  of  the 
Tennysons,  is  said  to  have  remarked,  ''Fifty  years 
hence  people  will  be  making  pilgrimages  to  this  spot. ' ' 

iC.  J.  C.  in  'Notes  and  Queries,'  March  14,  1891. 


TENNYSON'S  EARLY  YEARS  5 

He  certainly  wrote  in  1831  to  Tennyson's  sister  that 
many  years  and  even  many  ages  after  they  were  all  laid 
in  dust,  young  lovers  of  the  beautiful  and  the  true 
would  seek  the  region  where  the  mind  of  the  poet  had 
been  moulded  in  silent  sympathy  with  the  everlasting 
forces  of  nature ;  would  point  out  the  places  which  he 
would  be  supposed  to  have  celebrated.  Something  must 
of  course  be  pardoned  to  the  enthusiasm  of  strong  per- 
sonal attachment;  perhaps  even  more  to  the  fact  that 
the  speaker  was  very  much  in  love  with  his  friend's 
sister,  and  human  nature  is  so  constituted  that  a  cir- 
cumstance of  this  sort  has  a  tendency  to  check  the 
preservation  of  a  calm  and  judicial  attitude  of  mind 
towards  the  qualities  characterizing  that  sister's 
brother.  There  is  no  question,  however,  that  in  this 
case  the  prediction  has  been  fulfilled.  Pilgrimages 
were  made  to  the  spot  within  less  than  fifty  years 
afterward.  They  will  doubtless  continue  to  be  made 
when  many  additional  fifty  years  have  gone  by.  Still, 
it  is  not  necessary  to  attribute  an  inspired  clearness  of 
\-ision  to  the  utterance.  How  many  are  the  unfulfilled 
predictions  of  this  sort  for  which  at  the  time  there 
appeared  the  amplest  justification  to  their  utterers! 
They  have  been  proclaimed  in  all  sincerity  by  the  easy 
admiration  of  youth,  reinforced  by  the  magnifying 
power  of  personal  attachment.  When  the  predictions 
are  not  realized,  as  too  generally  they  are  not,  we  no 
longer  recall  them,  we  forget,  in  fact,  that  they  were 
ever  made.  But  the  one  success  in  prophecy  makes 
infinitely  more  impression  than  a  hundred  failures, 
and  we  cite  its  verification  as  a  proof  of  special  insight. 


6  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

In  the  rectory  of  the  little  village,  mth  four  poplars 
then  standing  before  its  door,  and  a  brook  flo^\ing  just 
below  its  garden,  the  childhood  and  most  of  the  early- 
youth  of  Alfred  Tennyson  were  spent.  Of  this  period 
of  his  life,  in  spite  of  the  numerous  biographies  of  him 
which  have  been  written,  we  have  largely  to  content 
ourselves  with  generalities.  For  this  the  poet  himself 
was  mainly  responsible.  He  was  particularly  hostile 
to  anything  in  the  shape  of  reports  of  his  sayings  and 
doings,  to  secure  which  seems  frequently  to  be  the 
specially  engrossing  desire  of  the  modern  author. 
This  attitude  was  as  marked  in  his  early  years  when 
no  one  sought  to  gather  information  about  him  as  it 
was  in  his  later  when  every  one  was  seeking  to  secure 
it  at  any  cost.  Then  as  afterward  he  held  himself 
aloof  from  others  in  the  intercourse  of  private  life. 
He  was  averse  to  having  his  personality  made  in  any 
way  conspicuous  before  the  public,  or  to  attracting  its 
attention  by  the  disclosure  of  what  he  thought  and 
said.  Yet  if  certain  accounts  are  to  be  trusted,  he 
would  have  gained  far  more  by  such  revelations  than 
he  would  have  lost.  His  intimate  friend,  FitzGerald, 
was  wont  to  express  regret  that  the  casual  utterances 
of  Tennyson  were  not  preserved.  They  were,  he 
declared,  sajdngs  to  be  remembered,  decisive  verdicts. 
*  *  Had  I  continued  to  be  with  him, ' '  he  wrote  to  a  friend 
in  1872,  ''I  would  have  risked  being  called  another 
Bozzy  by  the  thankless  World ;  and  have  often  looked 
in  vain  for  a  Note  Book  I  had  made  of  such  things." 

This  notebook  has  been  found  and  printed.  The 
reported  sayings  upon  which  FitzGerald  laid  so  much 


TENNYSON'S  EARLY  YEARS  7 

stress,  when  read  in  cold  blood,  hardly  justify  the 
praise  he  la^dshed.  Nothing  he  has  preserved  would 
lead  the  reader  to  believe  that  much  would  have  been 
lost  by  silence.  This  is  far,  however,  from  being  an 
uncommon  experience.  Vapid  and  lifeless,  not  to  say 
dull,  are  often  the  words  when  read,  which  seemed  so 
full  of  sparkle  and  charm  and  brilliancy  when  heard. 
Such  instances  are  frequent  in  the  case  of  men  whose 
conversation  has  attracted  and  delighted  numbers,  but 
cannot  stand  the  test  of  publication.  The  success  of 
the  sayings  depends  at  the  time  on  other  things  than 
upon  what  is  actually  said.  The  effect  produced  upon 
the  hearer  has  not  been  so  much  due  to  the  words  them- 
selves, or  even  to  the  thought  or  the  way  in  which  the 
thought  has  been  expressed.  It  is  rather  the  result  of 
attendant  circumstances — the  sjTnpathetic  audience, 
the  by-play  that  leads  up  to  the  utterance,  the  aptness 
of  the  introduction  to  the  comment  made  upon  the  sub- 
ject under  discussion,  the  looks  and  gestures  and 
intonations  with  which  the  sentiments  conveyed  are 
accompanied  and  enforced.  Detached  from  the  agen- 
cies which  contribute  to  the  immediate  impression,  the 
effectiveness  of  the  words  uttered  disappears.  Com- 
mitted to  print,  they  lose  the  point  and  force  which 
belonged  to  them  when  spoken. 

Still,  the  words  of  a  man  of  genius  are  well  worthy 
of  preservation  ^dthout  regard  to  their  intrinsic  value. 
The  world  is  neither  disposed  to  be  thankless  for  the 
gift  of  the  most  trivial  utterances  of  its  greatest  men, 
nor  to  blame  the  giver.  There  is  no  doubt,  however, 
as  to  the  state  of  mind  any  such  action  would  have 


8       LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

inspired  in  Tennyson  himself.  His  own  feelings  are 
distinctly  expressed  in  that  verse  of  'Will  Water- 
proof's Lyrical  Monologue,'  when  he  speaks  of  that 
remote  past  when  the  great  writer  could  give  freest 
utterance  to  his  thoughts  and  emotions  with  no  fear 
of  the  reporter  that  travels  in  darkness  or  of  the  inter- 
viewer that  wastes  at  noonday : 

Hours,  when  the  Poet's  words  and  looks 

Had  yet  their  native  glow; 
Nor  yet  the  fear  of  little  books 

Had  made  him  talk  for  show; 
But,  all  his  vast  heart  sherris-warm 'd, 

He  flash 'd  his  random  speeches. 
Ere  days,  that  deal  in  ana,  swarm 'd 

His  literary  leeches. 

This  is  far  from  being  the  only  time  or  place  in 
which  Tennyson  expressed  his  aversion  to  that 
remorseless  publicity  of  modern  life  which  waits  upon 
him  who  has  lifted  himself  up  to  a  high  position  among 
his  fellow  men.  Both  in  his  writings  and  in  his  conver- 
sation he  took  in  this  matter  the  extremest  of  extreme 
ground.  In  one  of  his  poems  he  manifested  his  feel- 
ings with  a  vehemence  that  amounted  almost  to  bitter- 
ness.   This  is  the  one  now  entitled,  'To after 

reading  a  Life  and  Letters.'  The  person  whom  he  is 
addressing  is  generally  supposed  to  be  his  brother 
Charles;  the  'Life  and  Letters'  which  he  read,  to  be 
the  biography  of  Keats  prepared  by  Milnes,  and  pub- 
lished in  1848.  Tennyson  seems  later  to  have  desired 
to  disclaim  the  idea  that  he  had  in  mind  this  particular 
volume.     The  only  reason  apparent  for  this  implied 


1\ 


TENNYSON'S  EARLY  YEARS  9 

denial  of  the  reference  to  the  work  is  that  it  might  be 
construed  into  an  attack  upon  a  personal  friend.  In 
truth,  in  his  journal,  William  Rossetti  records  an 
assertion  of  Tennyson  that  this  particular  poem  was 
written  by  him  "in  a  fit  of  intense  disgust"  after  read- 
ing Medwin's  journal  of  the  'Conversations  of  Lord 
Byron.'  It  is  so  easy  for  the  most  honest  of  reporters 
to  give  a  wrong  impression  of  what  has  actually  been 
said  that  the  reader  may  be  permitted  to  doubt  that 
the  poet  ever  made  any  unqualified  assertion  of  this 
sort.  It  may  be  that  Medwin's  w^ork  was  mentioned  by 
Tennyson  as  one  of  those  he  had  in  mind.  But  in 
itself  it  could  never  have  been  the  inspiration  of  the 
sentiments  expressed  in  this  particular  piece. 

The  lines  contained  a  peculiarly  strong  manifesta- 
tion of  his  personal  feelings.  They  were  originally 
printed  in  'The  Examiner'  for  March  24,  1849.  Later 
they  were  included  in  the  sixth  edition  of  the  'Poems' 
which  appeared  in  1850.  It  was  not  till  the  eighth  edi- 
tion which  came  out  in  the  latter  part  of  January, 
1853,  that  the  words  "After  reading  a  Life  and 
Letters"  were  added.  This  makes  it  clear  that  Med- 
win's work  could  not  have  been  the  one  to  which  refer- 
ence was  made.  That  author  had  not  written  a  life 
of  Byron,  nor  had  he  printed  his  letters.  He  simply 
purported  to  record  his  conversations.  As,  further- 
more, his  work  appeared  in  1824,  it  was  rather  late  in 
the  day  to  become  agitated  about  what  had  been 
reported  a  quarter  of  a  century  before.  The  poem,  it 
is  to  be  added,  had  after  its  title  a  quotation  of  the  last 
line  of  Shakespeare's  epitaph,  "Cursed  be  he  that 


10      LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

moves  my  bones. ' '  The  words  had  here  not  the  slight- 
est appropriateness.  Shakespeare,  or  whoever  wrote 
the  epitaph,  sought  simply  to  express  the  natural 
desire  that  the  body  should  be  left  undisturbed  in  the 
resting-place  to  which  it  had  been  consigned;  that  it 
should  not,  after  the  lapse  of  generations,  encounter 
the  fate  of  thousands  in  the  crowded  churchyards  of 
England  whose  bones  are  dug  up  to  make  room  for 
those  of  some  newcomer  to  the  grave.  He  was  not 
thinking  at  all  of  what  would  be  said  of  him  after  his 
death  or  what  revelations  would  be  made  of  his  words 
and  acts.  In  Tennyson's  quotation  from  the  epitaph 
invoking  Shakespeare's  curse  upon  those  who  will 
not  let  his  ashes  rest,  he  imputes  by  implication  to 
Shakespeare  feelings  which  the  great  dramatist 
pretty  certainly  never  had,  and  very  certainly  never 
expressed. 

Tennyson  was  indignant  that  Keats 's  letters  should 
have  been  published.  It  was  indicative  of  his  general 
attitude.  In  this  particular  he  stood  at  the  opposite 
pole  from  that  of  his  great  contemporary.  Browning 
entertained  no  objection  to  the  curiosity  felt  about  him 
and  his  works  by  ''the  many-headed  beast";  in  par- 
ticular none  when  it  sprang  from  respect  or  reverence. 
The  indignation  which  some  have  felt  and  others  have 
thought  it  decorous  to  feel  at  the  publication  of  the 
letters  which  passed  between  him  and  his  future  wife 
was  manifestly  one  with  which  that  poet  himself 
would  not  have  had  the  slightest  sympathy.  There  is 
little  question  that  Browning,  so  far  from  being  averse 
to  this  correspondence  seeing  the  light,  was  at  heart 


TENNYSON'S  EARLY  YEARS  11 

anxious  that  it  should  eventually  be  published.  He 
could  not  but  be  well  aware  that  it  redounded  to  the 
credit  of  himself  and  the  woman  to  whom  he  had 
become  affianced.  But  no  feelings  of  this  sort  char- 
acterized Tennyson.  His  idea  was  that  an  author 
should  be  known  only  by  his  works ;  that  his  sentiments 
about  men  and  things  should  never  be  disclosed;  and 
that  in  particular  there  should  be  no  revelation  of  his 
personal  characteristics  and  his  failings.  It  was  in 
these  words  that  in  the  poem  under  consideration  he 
expressed  his  feelings  towards  the  sort  of  biography 
for  which  he  entertained  special  aversion: 

For  now  the  Poet  cannot  die, 
Nor  leave  his  music  as  of  old, 
But  round  him  ere  he  scarce  be  cold 

Begins  the  scandal  and  the  cry: 

Proclaim  the  faults  he  would  not  show ; 

Break  lock  and  seal ;  betray  the  trust ; 

Keep  nothing  sacred ;  'tis  but  just 
The  many-headed  beast  should  know. 

He  ended  the  poem  by  contrasting  the  better  fate 
of  him  who  dies  unheard  to  that  of  him  who  drops  dead 
in  front  of  Glory's  temple  while  the  carrion  vulture 
waits  to  tear  his  heart  before  the  crowd. 

Tennyson's  aversion  to  having  anything  said  about 
himself  was  part  of  that  peculiar  susceptibility  to  criti- 
cism or  comment  of  any  sort  which  was  not  only  one 
of  his  greatest  weaknesses,  but  had  a  specially  injuri- 
ous effect  upon  the  success  of  his  early  career.  It  was 
ingrained  in  his  nature  and  influenced  his  whole  con- 


12  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

duct.  To  it  and  to  its  important  results  it  will  be  neces- 
sary to  call  attention  again  and  again.  The  truth  is 
that  he  sought  for  himself  two  things  absolutely  incom- 
patible. He  desired  general  recognition  from  the  pub- 
lic and  complete  privacy  for  himself.  He  who  gains 
the  benefit  of  greatness  must  be  resigned  to  partaking 
of  its  penalties.  Tennyson's  genius  lifted  him  to  a 
position  where  he  was  known  and  observed  of  all  men. 
Interest  in  what  he  said,  interest  in  what  he  did  was 
inevitable.  He  himself  spoke  of  the  fierce  light  which 
beats  upon  a  throne ;  but  that  light  beats  just  as  fiercely 
upon  him  who  occupies  the  throne  of  letters  as  upon 
him  who  occupies  the  throne  of  a  realm.  A  great 
intellectual  sovereign  can  no  more  succeed  in  hiding 
himself  from  the  curiosity  of  his  literary  subjects  than 
he  can  from  their  admiration  and  reverence.  The  one 
is  a  consequent  of  the  other.  It  is  not  to  the  discredit 
of  the  present  age,  on  the  contrary  it  is  distinctly  to 
its  credit,  that  it  cares  to  hear  more  about  its 
uncrowned  kings  than  it  does  about  those  who  are 
crowned. 

Tennyson  furthermore  was  utterly  mistaken  as  to 
the  cause  that  has  led  to  woeful  ignorance,  in  which  he 
seems  to  have  rejoiced,  of  the  great  writers  of  the  past. 
It  was  not  due  in  the  slightest  degree  to  the  reticence 
of  their  contemporaries,  to  their  lack  of  curiosity,  or 
to  their  indifference.  In  all  these  respects  the  men 
of  former  centuries  were  not  unlike  the  men  of 
our  own.  In  the  days  of  old,  the  poet  did  not  merely 
die  and  leave  his  music  behind  him  as  the  sole  reminder 
to  his  contemporaries  of  his  existence.    At  his  death, 


TENNYSON'S  EAKLY  YEARS  13 

then,  began  as  much  the  scandal  and  the  cry  as  there 
does  now.  The  carrion  vulture  was  then  waiting  to 
tear  his  heart  before  the  crowd  as  eagerly  as  it  waits 
now.  The  same  feeling  in  truth  has  existed  about  the 
great  writers  of  every  period  of  the  world's  history. 
Furthermore,  it  is  to  be  said  that  in  the  case  of  men 
whose  achievements  have  lifted  them  above  the  level 
of  the  crowd,  the  assumed  scandal  and  cry  which  arise 
at  their  death  are  purely  a  figment  of  the  imagination, 
as  much  as  is  the  existence  of  the  carrion  vulture 
waiting  to  tear  his  heart  out  before  the  crowd.  The 
death  of  every  really  great  man,  be  he  poet,  statesman, 
or  warrior,  instead  of  being  followed  by  a  proclama- 
tion of  his  faults,  is  marked  by  their  concealment.  His 
enemies,  if  enemies  he  has,  are  silent.  His  failings  are 
kept  in  the  background.  Detraction  is  hushed,  as  his 
sorrowing  fellow  men  become  increasingly  sensible  of 
what  they  have  lost.  The  attitude  almost  invariably 
taken  is  that  of  reverence,  the  sentiments  expressed 
are  those  of  grief  and  admiration.  These  same  feel- 
ings doubtless  existed  in  the  past  as  they  do  in  the 
present;  and  would  naturally  have  found  the  same 
avenue  to  expression.  But  no  means  existed  then  of 
imparting  to  the  general  public  what  was  well  known 
in  private  circles.  More  than  that,  there  was  then  no 
means  of  transmitting  this  knowledge  to  posterity.  It 
is  not  to  be  forgotten  furthermore  that  biography — in 
particular  the  biography  of  men  of  letters,  now  one  of 
the  principal  staples  of  literary  manufacture — hardly 
had  an  existence  worth  chronicling  before  the  latter 
part  of  the  eighteenth  century.    Hence  the  deplorably 


14  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

scanty   knowledge    we    possess    of    all    the    greatest 
authors  of  the  past. 

There  is  no  question  that  Tennyson  carried  this 
aversion  to  publicity  to  an  extreme  which  it  requires 
self-restraint  to  call  merely  ridiculous.  Some  of  the 
sentiments  he  expressed  on  the  subject  it  is  hard,  in 
truth,  to  take  seriously.  In  certain  instances  it  would 
be  paying  them  an  exaggerated  compliment  to  call 
them  silly.  Nothing  in  his  opinion  should  be  told  of 
an  author  save  what  he  himself  chose  to  reveal  per- 
sonally. '* The  poet's  work  is  his  life,  and  no  one  has  a 
right  to  ask  for  more,"  he  said  several  times  to  his 
friend,  Francis  Turner  Palgrave.  ''Eeaching  once," 
added  Palgrave,  "even  the  barbarity,  as  I  could  not 
help  calling  it,  that  if  Horace  had  left  an  autobiog- 
raphy, and  the  single  MS.  were  in  his  hands,  he  would 
throw  it  into  the  fire.  And,  consistently,  he  would 
never  read  such  Lives.  "^  Doubtless  if  such  a  state  of 
things  had  come  to  actual  trial,  he  would  not  have  done 
what  he  said.  If  he  had,  he  would  certainly  have 
deserved  not  only  to  be  thrown  into  the  fire  himself 
but  into  everlasting  fire,  and  his  memory  would  have 
been  held  in  just  execration  by  all  coming  generations. 
But  the  view  expressed  represented  after  a  fashion 
his  general  attitude.  In  a  letter  of  his  Farringford 
neighbor,  Mrs.  Cameron,  written  in  1860,  she  described 
him  as  pouring  out  his  feelings  on  this  subject  with 
positive  vigor  and  peculiar  folly.  The  desire  on  the 
part  of  readers  of  becoming  acquainted  with  the  per- 
sonal life  of  great  authors  he  represented  as  treating 

1 '  Alfred  Lord  Tennyson,  A  Memoir  by  his  Son, '  Vol.  II,  p.  484. 


TENNYSON'S  EARLY  YEARS  15 

them  ''like  pigs  to  be  ripped  open  for  the  public." 
He  thanked  God  Almighty  with  his  whole  heart  and 
soul  that  he  knew  nothing  of  Jane  Austen  and  that 
there  were  no  letters  preserved  either  of  her  or  of 
Shakespeare.  More  than  once  he  expressed  sentiments 
like  these  in  almost  the  same  words. 

Tennyson's  thanks  to  the  Almighty  had  to  suffer 
some  abatement,  for  he  lived  long  enough  to  see  letters 
of  Jane  Austen  published.  In  his  opinion  either  noth- 
ing whatever  was  to  be  told  of  the  person  whose  life 
was  written  or  only  that  which  would  deprive  it  of  the 
slightest  interest.  Accordingly  he  resented  the  por- 
trayal of  the  foibles  and  weaknesses  of  great  men.  If 
a  disagreeable  trait  was  disclosed,  it  was  to  the  dis- 
credit, not  of  the  possessor,  but  of  the  revealer  that 
the  disclosure  had  been  made.  His  attitude  in  this 
matter  is  brought  out  strikingly  in  a  comment  of  his 
which  seems  to  be  regarded  as  redounding  particularly 
to  his  credit.  At  Tunbridge  Wells  was  an  old  lady  who 
flourished  there  with  some  repute  on  the  strength  of 
having  known  Dr.  Johnson.  She  cherished  memories 
of  him  and  repeated  incidents  about  him.  Among 
other  things  she  observed  that  he  ''often  stirred  his 
lemonade  with  his  finger  and  that  often  dirty."  The 
observation  is  of  no  particular  consequence,  for  it  can 
hardly  be  said  to  add  anything  to  what  was  already 
known.  This  method  of  stirring  lemonade  does  not 
awaken  Tennyson's  resentment  but  the  account  of  it 
did.  That  the  great  man  should  have  a  dirty  finger 
and  should  use  it  improperly  appeared  to  be  in  his 
eyes  a  fact  which  was  not  to  the  discredit  of  the  owner 


16  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

of  the  finger;  but  the  relation  of  the  fact  was  very- 
much  to  the  discredit  of  the  narrator.  *'The  dirt  is 
on  her  own  heart,"  he  said. 

There  is  little  question  that  the  knowledge  of  some 
of  his  own  failings  was  one  of  the  reasons  that  led 
Tennyson  to  resent  any  disclosure  to  the  public  of  the 
infirmities  of  the  great.  Men  indeed,  as  a  general 
rule,  are  more  sensitive  about  the  revelation  of  their 
foibles  than  of  their  vices.  Tennyson's  dislike  of  per- 
sonal details  was  to  some  extent  based  upon  the 
knowledge  that  in  certain  particulars  he  was  himself 
far  from  impeccable.  Even  in  his  university  days  his 
immoderate  use  of  tobacco  was  a  matter  of  offence  to 
some  of  his  associates ;  for  in  that  earlier  time  indul- 
gence in  the  habit  was  far  from  being  so  general  as  it 
became  later.  Still  less  was  it  practised  on  the  grand 
scale  in  which  the  poet  displayed  it.  Many  indeed  are 
the  references  not  merely  to  his  excessive  use  of 
tobacco  but  to  the  sort  of  tobacco  he  used.  The  two 
things  did  not  impress  favorably  several  of  his  most 
attached  friends.  To  it  they  were  sometimes  wont  to 
ascribe  the  ailments  under  which  he  labored.  In  1838, 
Blakesley  wrote  to  Milnes  from  Trinity  College  of  a 
visit  which  the  poet  had  been  paying  there.  ''Alfred 
Tennyson,"  he  said,  ''has  been  with  us  for  the  last 
week.  He  is  looking  well  and  in  good  spirits,  but  com- 
plains of  nervousness.  How  should  he  do  otherwise, 
seeing  that  he  smokes  the  strongest  and  most  stinking 
tobacco  out  of  a  small  blackened  clay  pipe  on  an 
average  nine  hours  every  day?  He  went  off  to-day  by 
the  Wisbeach  to  Epping,  where  he  complains  that  there 


TENNYSON'S  EAELY  YEAES  17 

are  no  sounds  of  Nature  and  no  society ;  equally  a  want 
of  birds  and  men."^ 

Blakesley  lived  to  a  good  old  age,  but  the  friend  he 
criticised  survived  him  several  years.  As  Tennyson 
persisted  in  smoking  to  the  end  of  his  life,  it  is  reason- 
able to  suppose  that  the  diagnosis  of  the  cause  of  his 
nervousness  was  due  to  the  prejudices  of  the  writer 
rather  than  to  the  real  fact. 

A  more  s^Tnpathetic  tribute  to  his  prowess  as  a 
smoker  was  given  somewhat  later  by  one  who  was  fully 
competent  to  express  an  opinion  on  the  subject. 
'' Alfred,"  wrote  Carlyle  in  December,  1842,  ''is  a  right 
hearty  talker;  and  one  of  the  powerfullest  smokers 
I  have  ever  worked  along  with  in  that  department!"^ 
But  far  greater  censure  fell  upon  Tennyson  for  the 
carelessness  of  his  personal  habits  and  for  the  sloven- 
liness of  liis  dress.  There  is  more  than  one  reference 
in  the  correspondence  of  this  early  period  to  the  annoy- 
ance and  vexation  wrought  by  the  untidiness  of  his 
appearance.  So  subject  are  we  all  to  the  domination 
of  clothes  that  his  indifference  in  these  matters  grieved 
the  friendly  and  offended  the  fastidious.  They  did  not 
speak  of  it  to  his  enemies ;  but  they  deplored  it  among 
themselves.^ 

In  Tennyson's  opinion,  no  facts  of  this  kind  were  to 
be  mentioned.    The  view  of  biography  here  indicated, 

1  'Life,  Letters,  and  Friendships  of  Richard  Monckton  Milnes,'  edited 
by  T.  W.  Reid,  1891,  Vol.  T,  p.  221. 

2 'New  Letters  of  Thomas  Carlyle,'  edited  by  Alexander  Carlyle, 
Vol.  I,  p.  280. 

3  See  in  particular  a  letter  of  Henry  Hallam  in  '  Mrs.  Brookfield  and 
her  Circle,'  Vol.  I,  p.  213. 


18  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

it  is  fair  to  add,  has  been  by  no  means  peculiar  to  the 
poet.    It  is  held  by  many  in  theory.    By  others  it  has 
been  illustrated  in  practice,  not  merely  to  the  woeful 
discouragement  of  the  would-be  reader  but  to  the  com- 
plete effacement  from  human  interest  and  regard  of 
the  one,  however  brilliant  and  fascinating  he  may  have 
been,  who  has  been  made  its  victim.     The  prevalence 
of  this  belief  in  the  desirability  of  treating  great  men 
with  peculiar  tenderness  and  reticence  has  had  the 
result  of  turning  much  of  modern  biography  into  a 
portrayal  of  faultless  prigs  or  tedious  bores.    Absten- 
tion from  repeating  details  of  almost  any  sort,  but 
especially  of  those  which  might  cause  annoyance  or 
pain,  is  naturally  the  right  course  to  follow  while  the 
man  is  living.    During  that  period  respect  for  the  ordi- 
nary decencies  of  life  would  suffice  to  prevent  any  but 
a  thoroughly  vulgar  soul  from  intruding  upon  that 
privacy  which  every  one,  not  guilty  of  a  crime,  has  a 
right  to  demand  for  himself,  that  freedom  from  the 
revelation  to  the  public  of  his  personal  characteristics, 
of  his  foibles  and  his  failings.    But  in  the  case  of  the 
dead  who  are  worthy  of  our  admiration,  there  is  no 
reason  for  this  restraint.    What  we  then  have  a  right 
to  demand  is  a  full  and  faithful  portrayal  of  the  indi- 
vidual as  he  actually  was.     The  desire  we  have  to 
learn  the  exactest  details  of  the  lives  of  those  whose 
characters  we  cherish  and  in  whose  achievements  we 
take  pride,  is  one  of  the  most  creditable  characteristics 
of  human  nature.    We  never  admire  a  really  great  man 
the  less  because  we  have  come  to  know  of  his  weak- 
nesses, his  faults,  one  might  almost  add  his  vices.    For 


TENNYSON'S  EARLY  YEARS  19 

these  in  fact  we  are  often  disposed  to  love  him  the 
more,  if  he  is  worth  lo^dng  at  all.  Without  a  knowl- 
edge of  such  characteristics  the  picture  of  the  man 
would  be  incomplete.  The  great  poet  of  humanity  put 
into  the  mouth  of  Othello  a  representation  of  the  atti- 
tude which  should  be  assumed  by  every  biographer. 
Nothing  should  be  extenuated;  nothing  should  be  set 
do^vn  in  malice.  A  character  that  cannot  bear  to  have 
his  failings  revealed  is  ordinarily  not  worth  remember- 
ing; it  may  almost  be  said  that  his  life  is  not  worth 
living.  There  is  doubtless  such  a  thing  as  too  much 
insistence  upon  petty  personal  details.  Such  a  repre- 
sentation would  detract  as  much  from  the  verisimili- 
tude of  the  portrait  as  would  their  entire  omission,  and 
would  perhaps  detract  even  more.  But  that  is  the 
fault  of  the  writer  and  not  of  the  method. 

Tennyson's  view  of  the  subject  was  manifestly  dif- 
ferent from  Shakespeare's.  It  was  the  same  as  that 
of  those  friends  of  Johnson  who  deplored  Boswell's 
biography  as  an  unwarranted  and  loquacious  revela- 
tion of  every  weakness  and  infirmity  of  the  one  whom 
they  considered  to  be  the  greatest  good  man  of  the 
times.  They  called  it  treachery.  Yet  the  reason  why 
Johnson  is  so  near  to  all  of  us  and  so  dear  to  many  of 
us  is  due  to  that  very  personal  portrayal  against  which, 
had  he  been  then  living,  Tennyson  would  have  pro- 
tested fiercely.  By  many,  Boswell's  picture  of  the  man 
exactly  as  he  was  could  not  be  forgiven  at  the  time. 
Fanny  Burney  tells  us  that  Boswell  came  to  her  for 
some  *' choice  little  notes,"  as  he  expressed  it,  upon 
the  Doctor.     She  refused  to  help  him  and  was  much 


20  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

shocked  at  the  course  he  purposed  to  take.  ''We  have 
seen  him  long  enough  upon  stilts,"  Boswell  told  her. 
* '  I  want  to  show  him  in  a  new  light.  Grave  Sam,  and 
great  Sam,  and  solemn  Sam,  and  learned  Sam — all 
these  he  has  appeared  over  and  over.  Now  I  want  to 
entwine  a  wreath  of  the  graces  across  his  brow;  I 
want  to  show  him  as  gay  Sam,  agreeable  Sam,  pleas- 
ant Sam."^  How  much  wiser  Boswell  was  than  the 
wisest  of  his  contemporaries  the  public  realizes  fully 
now  and  came  soon  to  understand  then.  So  did  the 
publishers  who  had  preferred  to  entrust  the  prepara- 
tion of  the  story  of  Johnson's  career  to  the  pompous 
Sir  John  Hawkins,  whose  formal  and  stupid  biog- 
raphy was  speedily  extinguished  by  its  rival.  As  a 
result  of  Boswell 's  action  we  have  the  portrayal  of  a 
living,  breathing  man,  not  of  a  colorless  character 
which  has  hardly  the  vitality  of  a  wax  figure. 

This  aversion  to  the  inevitable  publicity  which  waits 
upon  a  career  like  his  own  was  all  the  more  unreason- 
able in  Tennyson  because  the  minutest  revelation  of 
the  details  of  his  life  would  have  no  other  effect  than 
to  raise  him  still  higher  in  the  estimation  of  the  world. 
Indeed  if  the  character  of  any  one  prominent  writer  of 
his  generation  could  be  trusted  to  come  out  essentially 
unscathed  from  the  severest  scrutiny,  it  would  be  his. 
Such  a  scrutiny  would  reveal  foibles  and  petty  failings, 
and  a  number  of  peculiarities,  not  altogether  pleas- 
ant, at  times  a  roughness  bordering  closely  upon  rude- 
ness, at  times  a  frankness  of  speech  that  was  occasion- 
ally hard  to  distinguish  from  brutality,  which,  taken 

1  'Diary  and  Letters  of  Madame  D'Arblay,'  1893,  Vol.  Ill,  p.  299. 


TENNYSON'S  EAKLY  YEARS  21 

together,  would  save  him  from  the  curse  of  being  mis- 
taken for  that  most  disagreeable  of  beings,  a  so-called 
saint.  But  it  would  bring  out  even  more  distinctly  on 
account  of  these  very  blots  the  essential  nobleness  of 
his  nature,  his  high  sense  of  honor,  his  loftiness  of 
spirit,  and  in  particular  his  superiority  to  that  com- 
mon weakness  of  authors  in  his  freedom  from  envy 
and  jealousy  of  rival  poets,  even  at  times  when  for  a 
short  period  they  seemed  about  to  threaten  his  posi- 
tion before  the  public.  In  this  respect  none  of  his 
contemporaries  would  surpass  him;  very  few  could 
stand  on  a  level  with  him.  To  him,  if  to  any  one, 
belonged  what  he  said  of  the  Prince  Consort,  that  he 
wore  '  *  the  white  flower  of  a  blameless  life. ' ' 

With  the  sentiments  he  not  merely  entertained. but 
felt  deeply,  it  is  quite  impossible  to  conceive  of  Tenny- 
son as  writing  an  autobiography.  But  the  keen  inter- 
est now  taken  in  the  details  of  the  life  of  a  great  author 
has  made  up  to  a  slight  extent  for  the  failure  of  the 
man  himself  to  furnish  much  information  directly.  It 
is,  however,  no  part  of  the  plan  of  the  present  work  to 
spend  much  time  in  tracing  Tennyson's  genealogy — 
genealogy  which  is  sometimes  the  spacious  but  invari- 
ably the  dark  and  dreary  vestibule  to  the  edifice  of 
English  biography.  Ancestors  in  general  are  as  unin- 
teresting a  body  of  persons  as  those  who  concern  them- 
selves with  the  lives  of  great  men  come  to  encounter. 
Still,  a  certain  degree  of  importance  attaches  to  the 
poet's  immediate  forbears,  his  fathjer  and  his  grand- 
father. Of  this  latter  too  little  knowledge  has  been 
vouchsafed.    In  his  early  life,  at  least,  George  Tenny- 


22  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

son  was  a  solicitor  at  Market  Rasen  in  Lincolnshire, 
near  which  his  estate  of  Bayons  Manor  lay.  He  was 
elected  a  representative  from  the  borough  of  Bletch- 
ingley  in  Surrey  to  the  last  Parliament  of  George  the 
Third.  This  met  in  August,  1818,  and  was  dissolved 
in  February,  1820,  on  the  death  of  the  king.  The 
grandfather,  however,  did  not  remain  a  member  of  it 
during  its  short  existence,  but  early  in  1819  accepted 
the  Chiltern  Hundreds.  In  the  parliamentary  register, 
his  name  is  given  not  as  George,  but  as  George  Clay- 
ton Tennyson.  In  the  course  of  his  life  he  accumu- 
lated a  fairly  large  fortune.  From  the  few  accounts 
of  him  which  have  come  down,  one  gets  the  impres- 
sion that  he  was  possessed  of  a  good  deal  more  of 
ability  than  of  amiability.  For  some  as  yet  unex- 
plained reason,  the  property  seems  to  have  been 
destined  from  an  early  period  to  pass  into  the  hands 
of  the  younger  brother  Charles  instead  of  the  elder. 
As  the  grandfather  lived  until  1835,  he  survived  by 
more  than  four  years  his  natural  heir.  At  a  compara- 
tively early  period  the  poet's  father  must  have  been 
aware  of  the  intention  to  disinherit  him.  As  a  sort 
of  compensation  for  the  intended  alienation  of  the 
property,  several  preferments  in  the  church  were  be- 
stowed upon  him ;  for  those  were  the  days  when  plural- 
ities prevailed.  He  was  made  rector  of  Somersby  and 
Wood  Enderby — two  adjacent  hamlets — and  also  in- 
cumbent of  Benniworth  and  vicar  of  Great  Grimsby. 
Still,  the  income  derived  from  these  combined  livings 
could  hardly  have  amounted  to  more  than  a  small  por- 


TENNYSON'S  EARLY  YEARS  23 

tion  of  the  value  of  the  inheritance  of  which  he  was 
deprived. 

Tennyson's    father    seems    to    have    remained    on 
friendly  terms  with  the  brother  who  had  been  selected 
to  take  his  place.     But  his  temperament,  naturally 
melancholy,  was  little  likely  to  be  soothed  by  the  ever 
present  consciousness  of  what  must  have  been  in  his 
eyes  an  undeserved  unkindness,  not  to  call  it  injury. 
In  any  country  the  treatment  he  received  would  give 
the  impression  of  injustice.     But  in  England  where 
primogeniture  has  for  centuries  been  invested  with  a 
peculiar  sort  of  sanctity,  the  setting  aside  of  what 
would  be  regarded  by  every  one  as  his  legitimate 
claims  could  hardly  have  failed  to  fret  the  spirit  of 
the  elder  son  almost  beyond  endurance.    It  was  per- 
haps the  disgrace  of  being  passed  over  that  was  harder 
to  bear  than  the  loss  of  the  property,  though  that 
involved  as  a  consequence  comparatively  narrow  cir- 
cumstances.   He  inwardly  brooded  over  it.    At  times 
he  fell  into  fits  of  despondency  which  cast  a  gloom 
over  the  whole  family.    No  doubt  this  depression  was 
to   a   certain   extent   constitutional   and   would   have 
shown  itself  under  any  circumstances.    Tennyson  him- 
self inherited  to  some  degree  this  tendency  towards 
it,  and  was  occasionally  subject  to  it  even  at  the  height 
of  his  fame  and  fortune.     But  the  treatment  he  re- 
ceived would  naturally  increase  the  despondent  dis- 
position of  the  father.    It  preyed  upon  his  spirits  and 
probably  impaired  his  health.     Pretty  surely  it  con- 
tributed its  part  towards  making  his  life  a  compara- 


24  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

tively  short  one;  for  he  was  but  fifty-three  years  old 
when  he  died/ 

Nor  apparently  was  the  masterful  grandfather  con- 
tent with  the  exercise  of  parental  power  in  diverting 
his  estate  from  the  eldest  son.  He  seems  to  have 
assumed,  or  rather  to  have  desired  to  assume,  the  right 
of  directing  the  course  in  life  of  his  son's  sons.  He 
sought  to  have  them  all  enter  the  ministry.  So  far 
as  can  be  gathered,  their  own  preferences  were  not 
to  be  taken  into  consideration.  His  plans  for  their 
future  were  not,  however,  carried  out  very  satisfac- 
torily. Of  the  seven  grandsons — all  of  whom  grew  up 
to  manhood — Charles  was  the  only  one  who  became  a 
clergyman.  Even  in  his  case  the  choice  of  the  profes- 
sion seems  not  to  have  been  dictated  by  any  desire  to 
defer  to  the  views  or  whims  of  the  grandfather,  but 
to  carry  out  the  wishes  of  his  uncle,  the  Eeverend 
Samuel  Turner  of  Caistor,  to  whose  property  he  was 
early  the  expectant  and  finally  the  actual  heir.  We 
know  indeed  that  this  crusty  and  eventually  gouty 
old  grandfather  was  looked  upon  with  anything  but 
regard  by  the  children  of  his  eldest  son.  There  was 
certainly  nothing  in  his  treatment  of  them  which  would 
predispose  them  to  entertain  feelings  in  his  favor. 
Their  attitude  towards  him  is  plainly  indicated  in 
letters  as  yet  unpublished. 

The  grandfather's  vision  of  the  future  was  no  more 
trustworthy  than  his  control  over  it  was  successful. 
At  his  request  Alfred  wrote  a  poem  on  the  death  of  his 
grandmother.    This  took  place  in  1825.    As  a  reward 

iBorn,  December  10,  1778;  died,  March  16,  1831. 


TENNYSON'S  EARLY  YEARS  25 

the  boy  received  a  small  sum  of  money.  Certain 
prophetic  words  accompanied  the  gift.  ''Here,"  said 
the  grandfather, ' '  is  half  a  guinea  for  you,  the  first  you 
have  ever  earned  by  poetry,  and  take  my  word  for  it, 
the  last. ' '  It  did  not  fall  to  his  lot  to  live  long  enough 
to  witness  the  more  than  utter  failure  of  his  predic- 
tion in  the  fortune  that  was  to  come  to  the  grandson 
from  this  then  much  derided  source.  Yet  his  life  was 
sufficiently  protracted  for  him  to  be  made  aware  that 
as  a  prophet  he  could  hardly  be  deemed  a  success. 
Tennyson's  father  took  what  turned  out  to  be  a  far 
juster  view.  He  recognized  in  the  early  productions  of 
his  son  the  promise  of  more  enduring  performance  to 
follow.  ' '  If  Alfred  die, ' '  he  said  on  one  occasion,  * '  one 
of  our  greatest  poets  will  have  gone."  This  was  not 
the  view  held  by  the  grim  old  grandfather.  When  told 
the  closing  year  of  his  life  that  his  grandson  had  pro- 
duced a  volume  of  poems,  he  remarked,  ' '  I  had  sooner 
have  heard  that  he  had  made  a  wheelbarrow. ' " 

Until  he  went  to  the  university,  far  the  larger  pro- 
portion of  Tennyson 's  childhood  and  youth  was  passed 
in  the  quietude  of  his  native  place  and  the  region 
immediately  adjacent.  The  only  exceptions  are  the 
years  he  spent  in  the  grammar  school  of  the  not  far 
distant  market  town  of  Louth.  Thither  he  repaired 
about  Christmas,  1816.  He  was  then  but  seven  and  a 
half  years  old.  His  brother  Charles  had  preceded  him 
at  a  similar  time  the  year  before.  There  Tennyson 
remained  for  the  next  four  years.  He  left  it  at  the 
Christmas  term  of  1820,  and  he  left  it  gladly.    Tenny- 

1  Alfred  Church 's  '  The  Laureate 's  Country, '  p.  63. 


26  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

son  never  cared  for  the  school  at  Louth, — it  might  be 
more  accurate  to  say  that  he  hated  it.  In  fact,  he  liked 
it  so  little  that  when  at  that  place  in  later  life  he  would 
not  go  do^\Ti  the  lane  where  it  was  situated.  Nor  did 
he  believe  that  he  got  from  it  any  benefit.  There  is  lit- 
tle doubt  that  his  opinion  was  correct.  The  truth  is  that 
the  school  was  then  of  a  type  too  generally  prevalent 
in  those  days.  The  instruction  was  bad,  the  instructors 
made  it  worse.  It  was  presided  over  by  a  man  whom 
it  would  be  a  compliment  to  call  a  ruffian.  Further- 
more, he  was  a  ruffian  of  a  peculiarly  bad  type — that 
is,  a  conscientious  ruffian.  In  this  respect  he  did  not 
differ  from  many,  perhaps  most,  of  the  headmasters 
then  presiding  over  the  English  public  schools;  and 
like  them  he  was  held  in  high  esteem,  not  only  by  his 
fellow  citizens  but  by  the  students  whom  he  flogged. 
The  system  of  education  pursued,  like  much  of  that 
then  in  vogue,  was  better  fitted  for  the  extinguishment 
of  the  abilities  of  the  student  than  for  their  develop- 
ment. Everything  had  to  be  learned  by  rote.  To 
understand  anjrthing  or  to  be  interested  in  anything 
was  not  a  matter  of  moment.  The  school  was  further 
characterized  by  the  methods  prevailing  in  that  old 
system  of  instruction  in  which  the  belief  was  firmly 
held  and  assiduously  carried  out  in  practice  that  noth- 
ing could  be  expected  to  stay  permanently  in  a  boy's 
brain  until  it  had  been  eifectively  driven  in  by  blows 
upon  his  body.  There  used  to  be  in  the  schoolroom, 
and  perhaps  still  is,  a  chair  impressed  with  the  govern- 
or's  seal,  which  represents  **a  master  with  a  rod  in 
his  upraised  hand  and  a  boy  crouching  before  him." 


TENNYSON'S  EARLY  YEARS  27 

It  was  symbolic  of  the  method  followed.  Teachers 
walked  up  and  down  the  room  with  implements  of  chas- 
tisement in  their  hands.  Ears  were  boxed  upon  every 
pretext,  knuckles  were  rapped.  Legs  and  arms  fur- 
nished constant  temptation  for  the  application  of  the 
cane.  "WTio  spares  the  rod  hates  the  child,  was  the 
inscription  in  Latin  posted  in  full  view  of  the  school- 
boys. Complaint  could  never  be  made  by  anyone  that 
this  proof  of  affectionate  regard  for  himself  and  solici- 
tude for  his  welfare  had  not  been  lavished  on  him  in 
abundance.  In  all  these  respects  the  school  has  now 
undergone  a  great  change.  It  is  not  merely  different 
in  character,  but  it  has  come  to  cherish  the  memory  of 
its  most  famous  pupil  who  did  not  love  it,  and  whom 
the  man  then  in  charge  of  it  apparently  did  not  love. 
A  white  marble  bust  of  the  poet  stands  in  the  room 
where  as  a  boy  he  studied  somewhat  and  suffered  a 
good  deal.  A  sleeping  section  in  this  building  bears 
the  name  of  the  Tennyson  dormitory. 

Nor  further  did  Tennyson  form  any  intimacies  with 
his  school  companions.  He  pretty  certainly  cared  for 
none.  Mr.  John  Cuming  Walters,  who  wrote  a  book^ 
on  the  homes  and  haunts  of  the  poet  in  Lincolnshire, 
was  informed  by  the  only  surviving  fellow  student  of 
Tennyson  at  the  grammar  school  that  even  there  he 
never  knew  him  to  associate  with  the  other  lads  or  to 
take  part  in  their  sports.  He  and  his  brother  Charles 
were  inseparable  companions.  They  walked  together, 
they  talked  together  exclusively.  Both  were  recog- 
nized as  possessing  ability;  but  neither  stood  high  in 

1 '  In  Tennyson  Land, '  1890. 


28  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

their  classes.  Both  were  strong  and  stalwart;  but 
neither  engaged  in  athletic  exercises  nor  was  seen  in 
the  playground.  From  such  associations  or  rather 
lack  of  associations,  from  such  methods  of  instruction, 
from  such  a  system  of  discipline,  a  change  to  their 
own  home  could  hardly  have  been  otherwise  than  wel- 
come. There  it  was  that  they  spent  the  years  which 
followed  until  they  went  to  the  university.  Their 
father  became  their  instructor.  He  would  have  been 
different  from  the  usual  run  of  fathers  who  assume 
that  position  towards  their  children  if  he  had  not  been 
a  rigorous  one.  He  not  merely  taught  them ;  he  made 
them  study.  There  is  little  doubt  that  he  did  not  err 
on  the  side  of  undue  leniency.  As  one  who  knew  him 
in  those  days  observed,  he  was  ''amazing  sharp"  mth 
them.  Still,  it  was  not  merely  a  profitable  change  from 
the  methods  of  instruction  pursued  at  the  Louth  school, 
it  was  far  from  being  an  unpleasant  one  in  spite  of 
general  sternness  and  perhaps  of  occasional  harshness. 
The  father,  too,  was  an  excellent  scholar ;  at  least  that 
was  the  repute  in  which  he  was  held.  In  addition, 
for  the  sake  of  those  with  whose  education  he  intrusted 
himself,  he  gave  up  time  and  labor  to  render  more 
perfect  his  knowledge  of  the  studies  he  set  out  to 
teach. 

Here  for  the  next  seven  years  Tennyson  spent  his 
life.  To  one  of  his  nature  there  were  advantages  in 
his  confinement  to  this  secluded  region  which  out- 
weighed all  its  disadvantages.  These  did  not  consist 
in  the  fact  that  the  boy  was  far  removed  from  the 
temptations  of  the  city.     Such,  though  different  in 


TENNYSON'S  EARLY  YEARS  29 

kind,  are  no  worse  than  those  of  the  country.  But  he 
was  removed  from  its  distractions.  Somersby  was  one 
of  the  quietest  of  the  quiet  wold  villages.  For  tliis 
very  reason  it  was  in  certain  ways  well  fitted  for  the 
youth  of  a  poet.  Talent  usually  finds  its  most  satis- 
factory development  amid  the  activities  of  life  where 
it  is  forced  to  come  into  constant  contact  and  occa- 
sional collision  with  men.  But  the  best  nursing-place 
of  genius  is  retirement,  which  with  its  attendant  con- 
templation and  reflection  brings  the  mind  into  frequent 
communion  "with  itself. 

FurtheiTnore,  the  comparative  solitude  of  his  early 
years  gave  Tennyson  ample  time  for  reading  and 
study  during  that  period  of  his  life  when  these  occu- 
pations are  not  so  important  for  the  acquisition  of 
knowledge  they  bring  as  for  the  influence  they  "s^^ield 
over  the  intellectual  development.  The  absence  of  all 
disturbing  elements  contributed  not  merely  to  profi- 
ciency in  learning  but  to  the  creation  of  a  love  for  the 
highest  literature.  His  father's  library  was  an  excel- 
lent one  for  its  size.  It  was  made  up  largely  of  the 
best  books  of  the  best  authors  in  various  languages. 
With  them  the  cliildren  had  ample  leisure  to  familiar- 
ize themselves  thoroughly.  These  indeed  they  were 
forced  to  read  if  they  read  anything;  and  they  were 
fond  of  reading.  Another  advantage,  therefore,  of  this 
remoteness  from  populous  centers  was  that  during  the 
most  impressionable  period  of  life  the  boy's  attention 
was  not  drawn  away  from  the  great  works  of  the  great 
literatures  of  the  world  by  a  swarm  of  ephemeral  pro- 
ductions which  in  crowded  cities  are  always  brought 


30  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

to  the  sight  and  fairly  thrust  themselves  upon  the 
notice  of  those  who  would  ordinarily  have  remained 
unaware  of  their  existence. 

In  all  these  respects,  therefore,  the  conditions  which 
surrounded  the  youth  of  the  poet  were  peculiarly 
favorable.  Little  there  was  in  the  scenes  and  sur- 
roundings of  his  boyhood  or  in  its  occurrences  to  dis- 
turb the  monotony  of  existence  which  pervaded  the 
community  in  which  his  early  years  were  spent.  Few 
opportunities  existed  for  communication  with  the 
world  outside,  or  for  sharing  in  its  activities  or  dis- 
tractions. The  mail  reached  Somersby  but  two  or 
three  times  a  week.  At  the  frequent  summer  resort 
of  the  family  at  Mablethorpe,  there  was  at  that  time 
none  at  all,  unless  it  came  through  some  chance  agency. 
Furthermore,  in  that  sparsely  settled  hamlet  there 
was  but  scanty  society  for  the  children  outside  of  that 
which  they  found  in  their  own  home.  The  persons  with 
whom  they  would  most  naturally  associate  dwelt  at 
greater  or  less  distance.  Of  some  of  them  they  saw, 
comparatively  speaking,  a  good  deal,  if  the  conditions 
that  prevented  frequency  of  intercourse  be  taken  into 
consideration.  Still,  the  fact  that  such  persons  could 
only  be  seen  at  intervals  naturally  stood  in  the  way 
of  indulgence  in  many  close  intimacies.  The  children 
were  in  consequence  largely  thrown  upon  themselves 
for  society.  With  books  and  talk  about  books,  with 
poetry  and  music,  they  passed  the  days.  They  seem 
indeed  to  have  grown  up  without  any  particular  re- 
straint. Within  limits  they  were  allowed  to  do  about  as 
they  pleased.     As,  however  eccentric  their  conduct, 


TENNYSON'S  EAELY  YEARS  31 

there  was  nothing  vicious  in  their  natures,  this  lack  of 
restraint  was  productive  of  nothing  but  good.  Accord- 
ingly, when  freed  from  the  confinement  of  their  lessons, 
their  tendency  was  to  fleet  the  time  carelessly  as  in  the 
golden  world.  ' '  They  were  always  running  about  from 
one  place  to  another,"  an  old  resident  told  Mr.  Wal- 
ters, ''and  every  one  knew  them  and  their  Bohemian 
ways.  They  all  wrote  verses,  they  never  had  any 
pocket  money,  and  they  took  long  walks  at  night- 
time, and  they  were  decidedly  exclusive.'" 

Reports  naturally  came  to  cluster  about  the  uncon- 
ventional and  self-absorbed  ways  of  that  one  of  the 
family  who  was  destined  to  make  its  name  famous. 
Stories  there  were  of  his  carelessness  in  dress,  or 
rather  of  his  complete  indifference  to  it;  of  his  walk- 
ing again  and  again  up  and  do^vn  the  carriage-way, 
shouting  and  hallooing  while  carrying  a  book  in  his 
hand;  of  his  wandering  off  by  himself  wdth  his  long 
hair,  under  no  restraint  from  a  hat,  floating  in  the 
wind,  and  ^vithout  a  coat  to  his  back,  talking  vehe- 
mently to  himself,  as  he  wandered  along  the  sand  hills 
that  line  the  coast.  This  was  not  a  course  of  conduct 
to  meet  the  approval  of  the  staid  members  of  that 
rural  community.  There  was  a  very  general  impres- 
sion among  the  rustic  inhabitants  of  the  region  that 
the  boy  was  daft.  ''Many  a  time,"  Mr.  Walters  tells 
us,  "has  Alfred  been  met  miles  away  from  home,  hat- 
less  and  quite  absorbed,  sometimes  only  realizing  his 
situation  when  his  further  journeying  was  prevented 

1  '  In  Tennyson  Land, '  p.  40. 


32      LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

by  the  sea.'"  This  habit  of  self-absorption,  seen  in 
childhood,  never  left  the  man.  The  life  he  led  in  his 
youth  would  also  have  naturally  little  effect  in  break- 
ing up  that  crust  of  shyness  and  reserve  which  was 
part  of  his  nature.  The  habit  of  isolation  which  had 
distinguished  him  during  his  school  life  continued  to 
a  great  extent  after  his  return  to  his  home.  In  truth, 
it  continued  during  the  whole  of  his  career.  Unques- 
tionably his  self-absorption  and  reserve  contributed  at 
times  to  his  personal  unpopularity.  It  furnished 
sufficient  ground  for  the  intruder  upon  his  retirement 
to  complain  that  he  had  gone  to  see  a  lion  and  had 
found  only  a  bear. 

Quiet  however  as  was  Somersby,  it  did  not  lack 
attractions  of  divers  kinds  to  appeal  to  the  impres- 
sionable nature  of  the  boy.  The  region  all  about  was 
covered  with  pretty  hamlets,  with  copse  woods,  with 
roads  lined  with  long  avenues  of  elms,  with  embowered 
lanes ;  with  huge  moats  belonging  to  granges  which  had 
disappeared;  with  manor  houses  and  their  terraced 
gardens  rejoicing  in  the  gorgeous  flowers  with  which 
that  district  of  country  abounded;  with  windmills 
on  the  wolds  and  water-mills  in  the  valley;  with  fre- 
quent churches  mthin  whose  walls  lay  cross-legged 
the  monuments,  as  it  was  believed,  of  old  crusaders. 
Northward  of  the  little  place  rose  to  their  greatest 
height  the  chalky  cliffs  of  the  Wolds.  Mounting  them 
was  a  steep  and  treeless  pike  which  led  to  the  market 
town  of  Louth.  From  it  could  be  seen  the  long 
stretches  of  level  land  parallel  with  the  coast  over 

1 '  In  Tennyson  Land, '  p.  40. 


TENNYSON'S  EAKLY  YEARS  33 

whose  flat  surface  blew  at  times  with  tumultuous  fury 
the  fierce  winds  of  the  German  Ocean.  From  the  hills 
the  eye  commands  the  wide  expanse  of  the  marsh  with 
its  streams  of  channelled  waters  extending  from  hori- 
zon to  horizon  and  moving  sluggishly  towards  their 
outlet,  spanned  in  all  directions  by  the  frequent  bridge. 
Perhaps  even  more  appealing  to  the  poetic  spirit 
was  the  long  line  of  coast  bounding  the  marsh  on  the 
east  with  its  mounds  of  sand  heaped  up  along  the 
shore  by  the  stormy  waters  of  the  North  Sea,  covered 
and  held  firm  by  the  vegetation  which  had  sprung  up. 
All  this  region  was  familiar  to  the  children  of  the 
household.  It  was  the  scene  of  much  of  their  recrea- 
tion and  play.  There  for  them  v/as  the  far-receding 
tide  of  Skegness  and  Gibraltar  Point,  which  left  at 
low  water  a  long  and  wide  expanse  of  sand  in  which 
the  bare-legged  brothers  and  sisters  could  disport 
themselves  for  hours.  There,  too,  was  the  Mable- 
thorpe  beach  on  which  in  stormy  weather  the  plung- 
ing waves  would  break  with  thunderous  roar,  the  tem- 
pestuous wind  beating  their  crests  into  foam,  driving 
the  water  up  the  sand  dunes,  and  scattering  far  and 
wide  the  spray.  The  beauty  of  it  and  the  might  of  it 
made  an  indelible  impression  upon  the  mind  of  the 
growing  boy.  The  sea,  indeed,  was  always  Tennyson's 
delight.  To  watch  the  onset  of  the  ever  restless  waves 
and  listen  to  their  roar  was  for  him  a  perpetual  pleas- 
ure. The  feeling  began  in  childhood  and  remained 
until  the  end.  In  later  life  he  remembered  and  re- 
corded the  sentiments  of  his  early  years  when  he  tells 
us  he  read  in  the  Revelation  of  St.  John  of  the  new 


34  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

heaven  and  the  new  earth  which  were  to  come  when 
the  first  heaven  and  the  first  earth  had  passed  away. 
*'And  there  was  no  more  sea,"  concludes  the  Apostle. 
**I  remember  reading  that  when  a  child,"  Tennyson 
wrote  in  1848,  ' '  and  not  being  able  to  reconcile  myself 
to  a  future  when  there  should  be  no  more  sea. ' " 

The  scenes  and  sights  which  early  met  his  eyes  are 
constantly  reflected  in  his  verse.  Doubtless  they  lost 
something  of  their  charm  to  the  man  himself  as  he 
grew  in  years.  Yet  as  doubtlessly  they  became  glori- 
fied in  memory  after  he  had  bidden  them  a  final 
farewell  in  order  to  share  in  the  struggles  of  the  world 
outside.  He  would  then  forget  their  discomforts  and 
recall  only  their  attraction.  Still,  when  later  he  would 
return  to  them,  they  would  not  always  be  to  him  what 
he  had  fancied  them  to  be.  The  moorland  would  be 
more  barren,  the  shore  would  be  more  dreary.  This 
different  attitude  of  the  mind  at  different  times  is 
shown  in  the  well-known  lines  in  which  he  described 
the  fairy  picture  which  the  boy  dreamed  and  the  reality 
which  the  boy  when  grown  to  manhood  came  to  see : 

Here  often,  when  a  child  I  lay  reclined, 

I  took  delight  in  this  fair  strand  and  free ; 
Here  stood  the  infant  Ilion  of  the  mind, 

And  here  the  Grecian  ships  all  seem'd  to  be. 
And  here  again  I  come,  and  only  find 

The  drain-cut  levels  of  the  marshy  lea, — 
Gray  sand-banks  and  pale  sunsets, — dreary  wind. 

Dim  shores,  dense  rains,  and  heavy  clouded  sea.^ 

1 '  Memoir, '  Vol.  I,  p.  238. 

2  Lines  contributed  to  'The  Manchester  Athenseum  Album,'  1850,  in 
'Memoir,'  Vol.  I,  p.  161. 


TENNYSON'S  EARLY  YEARS  35 

It  is  indeed  from  incidental  references  in  his  owti 
writings  that  we  get  the  fullest  insight  into  the 
thoughts  and  feelings  of  Tennyson's  early  life  as  well 
as  the  objects  which  met  his  gaze.  One  of  the  best,  if 
not  the  best  of  the  poems  which  made  up  the  volume 
of  1830/  sets  forth  \T.vidly  the  various  scenes  which 
were  ever  before  his  eyes.  It  is  in  the  lines  addressed 
to  memory  in  which  he  paints  those  scenes  which  had 
impressed  him  peculiarly: 

Come  from  the  woods  that  belt  the  gray  hillside, 
The  seven  elms,  the  poplars  four 
That  stand  beside  my  father's  door, 
And  chiefly  from  the  brook  that  loves 
To  purl  0  'er  matted  cress  and  ribbed  sand 
Or  dimple  in  the  dark  of  rushy  coves, 
Drawing  into  her  narrow  earthen  urn. 

In  every  elbow  and  turn, 
The  filter 'd  tribute  of  the  rough  woodland. 

0  !  hither  lead  thy  feet ! 
Pour  round  mine  ears  the  livelong  bleat 
Of  the  thick-fleeced  sheep  from  wattled  folds 

Upon  the  ridged  wolds, 
When  the  first  matin-song  hath  waken 'd  loud 
Over  the  dark  dewy  earth  forlorn, 
"What  time  the  amber  morn 
Forth  gushes  from  beneath  a  low-hung  cloud. 

Perhaps  even  more  vividly  descriptive  of  the  sights 
that  were  ever  before  the  eyes  of  the  boy  are  the  lines 
in  the  same  poem  where  he  speaks  of 

1' Poems,  chiefly  Lyrical,'  1830. 


36      LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

.    .    .  the  high  field  on  the  bushless  Pike, 

Or  even  a  sand-built  ridge 

Of  heaped  hills  that  mound  the  sea, 

Overblo\^^l  with  murmurs  harsh, 

Or  even  a  lowly  cottage  whence  we  see 

Stretch  'd  wide  and  wild  the  waste  enormous  marsh, 

"Where  from  the  frequent  bridge, 

Like  emblems  of  eternity, 

The  trenched  waters  run  from  sky  to  sky. 

Of  his  early  poetical  tastes  and  of  his  early  efforts 
in  verse  Tennyson,  for  once  abandoning  his  usual 
reticence,  has  left  us  a  slight  record.  Thomson  was 
the  first  poet  he  knew.  It  was  rather  a  singular  choice 
for  a  child.  When  about  ten  or  eleven  years  old, 
Pope's  translation  of  the  Iliad  exercised  over  him  the 
peculiar  fascination  which  it  has  exercised  over  so 
many  poets  at  about  this  period  of  life.  Later  he  fell 
under  the  influence  of  Walter  Scott,  in  whose  style  he 
wrote  an  epic  of  six  thousand  lines.  At  the  age  of 
fourteen  he  produced  a  drama  in  blank  verse.  This 
last  may  have  survived  the  destruction  which  has  over- 
taken the  other  pieces;  but  if  so,  it  has  not  been 
printed.  The  taste,  indeed,  for  poetical  composition 
was  not  confined  to  him  alone  of  the  children ;  it  appar- 
ently prevailed  in  the  whole  Tennyson  family.  The 
father  was  himself  addicted  to  the  composition  of 
verses.  He  never  published  them;  but  three  of  his 
sons  brought  out  volumes  of  poems.  Though  only 
one  of  the  number  attained  fame,  there  was  not  at  the 
outset  assurance  that  Alfred  would  be  the  one.  Two 
others  had  their  partisans.    Charles,  in  particular,  had 


TENNYSON'S  EARLY  YEARS  37 

his  advocates.  FitzGerald  held  Frederick,  the  eldest 
of  the  brothers,  as  altogether  superior.  The  same 
preference  was  shown  by  the  Brownings.  FitzGerald 
wrote  to  him  on  the  subject  in  1849.^  ''You  and  he" — 
by  he  he  meant  Alfred — ' '  are  the  only  men  alive  whose 
poems  I  want  to  see  in  print,"  are  his  words.  Later 
he  renewed  the  same  request.  "As  you  know,"  he 
wrote  in  1850,  "I  admire  your  poems,  the  only  poems 
by  a  living  writer  I  do  admire,  except  Alfred's."^ 
Whether  in  consequence  of  this  urgency  or  not,  Fred- 
erick Tennyson  published  in  1854  a  volume  of  poems 
entitled  '  Days  and  Hours. '  It  was  received  generally 
with  respectful  and  in  some  quarters  with  enthusiastic 
mention.  But  whatever  success  it  gained  was  confined 
to  the  critics.  With  the  public  it  never  met  with  any 
peculiar  favor,  and  its  author  published  nothing  more 
till  1890,  eight  years  before  his  death.  But  his  later 
volumes  were  hardly  more  successful  than  his  first. 

Tennyson  would  have  been  different  from  the  rest 
of  the  world,  had  he  not  at  that  time  fallen  under  the 
sway  of  the  overpowering  personality  of  Byron.  He 
did  fall  under  it.  The  story  has  been  told  again  and 
again  since  its  first  mention  how  profoundly  the  im- 
pressionable boy  of  fifteen  was  affected  when  the  news 
reached  the  quiet  Lincolnshire  hamlet  that  Byron  was 
no  more;  how  full  of  consternation  he  was;  how  he 
went  off  by  himself  and  wrote  on  the  sand,  "Byron  is 
dead. ' '    It  was  something  almost  impossible  to  credit. 

1' Letters  and  Literary  Remains  of  Edward  FitzGerald,'  Vol.  I, 
p.  195. 

zlhid.,  p.  203. 


38      LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

*■ '  I  thought, ' '  he  said, ' '  the  whole  world  was  at  an  end. 
I  thought  everything  was  over  and  finished  for  every 
one — that  nothing  else  mattered."^  Tennyson  came 
afterward  for  a  time  at  least  to  share  in  the  undue 
depreciation  which  sooner  or  later  is  sure  to  over- 
take any  reputation  whether  duly  or  unduly  exalted. 
In  truth,  there  was  a  period  in  Tennyson's  life  when 
he  indulged  in  that  cheapest  of  cheap  criticism  which 
styled  the  poetry  of  Byron  rhetoric.  This  was  a  vague 
word  used  to  express  a  vague  idea  that  Byron  is  not 
profoundly  reflective,  as  of  course  the  speaker  always 
is.  At  a  later  period  Tennyson  took  a  somewhat  dif- 
ferent view.  He  believed  that  Byron's  reputation 
would  rise  and  that  he  would  come  to  his  own  again. 
But  under  no  circumstances  could  Tennyson  have  be- 
longed for  any  length  of  time  to  the  school  which  Byron 
had  founded,  however  much  his  spirit  might  have 
been  affected  by  him  while  his  influence  was  most  pre- 
vailing. Both  in  feeling  and  expression  the  two  were 
as  far  apart  as  the  poles.  No  proper  comparison  can 
be  made  between  natures  which  had  so  little  in  common 
in  thought  and  utterance.  The  business  of  comparison 
between  great  writers  is  in  general  unsatisfactory  but 
there  are  instances  like  the  present  when  it  assumes 
the  dimensions  of  the  absurd. 

With  men  who  have  genius  for  poetry,  its  existence 
is  almost  certain  to  disclose  itself  in  early  production. 
It  perhaps  hardly  needs  to  be  added  that  this  par- 
ticular method  of  manifesting  itself  is  very  far  from 
being  confined  to  men  of  genius.    The  further  general 

1  Mrs.  Kitchie  's  '  Records  of  Tennyson,  Euskin,  Browning, '  p.  12. 


TENNYSON'S  EARLY  YEARS  39 

statement  may  be  safely  made  that  there  is  one  respect 
in  which  poetical  composition  stands  apart  from  other 
activities  of  the  creative  intellect.  When  once  the  pro- 
ducer has  reached  full  maturity  the  quality  of  the  prod- 
uct is  little  likely  to  be  further  improved  with  age. 
No  rule  indeed  can  be  laid  do^vn  which  will  not  show 
exceptions.  Still,  it  is  rarely  the  case  that  he  sur- 
passes after  he  has  reached  thirty  the  work  produced 
before  that  time.  Sometimes  he  fails  to  equal  it.  In 
the  career  of  a  poet  the  age  between  twenty-five  and 
fifty  is  usually  not  only  the  most  productive  period, 
but  it  is  also  the  period  of  most  satisfactory  produc- 
tion, frequently  of  the  only  satisfactory  production. 
Ordinarily  indeed  the  further  limit  might  be  restricted 
to  forty.  Poetry,  in  truth,  is  a  literary  growth  which 
flowers  early. 

This  fact  the  writers  of  the  Georgian  era  exemplify 
uniformly.  The  assertion  made  about  them  might  be 
extended  to  nearly  all  the  writers  of  every  period.  As 
this  is  a  view  unfamiliar  to  many,  it  may  be  well  to  add 
that  the  history  of  English  poetry  and  poets  bears  con- 
clusive testimony  to  its  truth.  The  exceptions  are  but 
few ;  and  even  these  are  often  more  apparent  than  real. 
Chaucer,  it  may  be,  was  one  of  them.  But  besides  the 
possibility,  if  not  probability,  that  a  good  deal  of  his 
first  production  has  perished,  he  had  laid  upon  him 
the  burden  of  shaping  and  perfecting  the  vehicle  he 
employed.  Milton,  again,  did  not  produce  his  epic  till 
late  in  life.  But  in  his  early  years  he  had  manifested 
his  possession  of  poetic  power  of  the  highest  grade. 
There  is  indeed  every  reason  to  believe  that  'Paradise 


40  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

Lost'  would  have  been  an  even  nobler  work  than  it  is, 
had  it  been  written  at  a  period  of  life  when  the  fervor 
and  fire  of  youth  had  not  yet  been  impaired  by  age 
but  merely  strengthened  and  tempered  by  the  judg- 
ment of  maturer  years.  Dryden  is,  in  fact,  the  only 
great  modern  poet  whose  first  production  gave  little 
or  no  assurance  of  the  position  he  was  afterwards  to 
attain ;  but  Dryden  is  more  a  poet  of  the  intellect  than 
of  the  feelings.  Far  the  largest  share  of  great  verse 
in  English  literature  has  been  produced  before  its 
creators  have  reached  the  middle  period  of  man's 
allotted  life  on  earth. 

To  this  general  rule  of  the  excellence  of  early  pro- 
duction by  a  great  poet,  Tennyson,  as  will  be  seen,  is 
no  exception,  even  if  he  be  considered  an  exception  to 
the  decay  which  ordinarily  follows  it. 


CHAPTER  II 
POEMS  BY  TWO  BROTHERS 

It  was  while  the  children  were  carrying  on  their 
studies  at  home,  reading  in  a  desultory  fashion  but  on 
an  extensive  scale,  that  two  of  them — Charles  and 
Alfred — during  the  years  immediately  preceding  their 
entrance  into  Cambridge  University,  prepared  a 
volume  for  the  press.  It  was  entitled  'Poems  by  Two 
Brothers.'  When  the  book  came  out,  the  elder  of  the 
two  was  nineteen  years  old,  the  younger  a  little  less 
than  eighteen. 

It  was  in  the  latter  part  of  April,  1827,  that  this 
work  made  its  appearance.  It  was  published  by  a 
firm  of  provincial  booksellers,  J.  and  J.  Jackson  of 
Louth,  who  were  the  owners  of  the  copyright.  On  the 
title-page,  however,  the  name  of  the  London  publish- 
ing house  of  W.  Simpkin  and  R.  Marshall  took  prece- 
dence. The  book  was  prefaced  by  a  so-called  adver- 
tisement stating  that  the  pieces  which  composed  it  had 
been  written  ' '  from  the  ages  of  fifteen  to  eighteen,  not 
conjointly,  but  individually."  It  was  further  added, 
somewhat  modestly,  though  boyishly,  that  if  the  work 
were  subjected  to  "the  microscopic  eye  of  periodical 
criticism,"  a  long  list  of  inaccuracies  and  imitations 
would  doubtless  result  as  an  outcome  of  the  investiga- 
tion.   But  the  authors  went  on  to  say,  as  did  Byron  in 


42  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

the  preface  to  his  'Hours  of  Idleness,'  that  they  had 
passed  the  Rubicon  and  must  necessarily  encounter 
whatever  fate  the  future  had  in  store.  In  truth,  this 
advertisement  was  manifestly  inspired  by  Byron's 
preface  to  his  first  venture,  though  it  is  a  little  more 
than  a  dozen  lines,  while  his  extended  to  some  pages. 
The  spirit,  however,  was  exactly  the  same ;  the  thought 
was  the  same,  so  far  as  it  could  be  under  the  varying 
conditions.  There  can  be  no  reasonable  doubt  that  the 
author  of  the  later  brief  preface  had  in  his  mind,  while 
writing  it,  the  earlier  preface  to  the  somewhat  similar 
collection  of  boyish  verses. 

The  original  volume  is  now  one  of  the  scarcest  of 
books.  It  commands  accordingly  an  exceptionally  high 
price  whenever  a  copy  appears  on  the  market.  The 
poems  contained  in  it  are  precisely  one  hundred  and 
three  in  number.  This  number,  however,  includes  one 
written  by  Charles,  which  serves  as  a  kind  of  intro- 
duction to  the  whole  work.  The  manuscript  of  the 
volume  was  later  unearthed  at  the  printing-office,  and 
a  reproduction  of  the  original  was  brought  out  in  1893. 
In  this  reprint  the  initials  of  the  writers  were  attached 
to  the  different  pieces,  so  far  as  that  could  then  be 
determined  with  reasonable  certainty.  Here  it  may  be 
said  that  the  designation  of  the  authorship  then  made, 
agreed  pretty  generally  with  what  had  previously  been 
reached  by  competent  critics  on  the  ground  of  internal 
evidence.  In  the  reprint  the  authorship  of  forty-eight 
of  the  pieces  was  assigned  to  Charles  Tennyson;  that 
of  forty-two  to  Alfred.  The  rest  were  in  most 
instances  left  undetermined.     Three,  however,  bore 


POEMS  BY  TWO  BROTHERS  43 

the  signature  of  the  eldest  brother,  Frederick  Tenny- 
son. In  the  preface  to  the  book,  the  number  of  his 
contributions  is  said  to  be  four.  Accordingly  one  of 
them  seems  to  have  been  left  unindicated.  The  long- 
est poem  in  the  whole  volume — 'The  Oak  of  the 
North' — was  of  his  composition.  Nor  is  either  one 
of  the  two  others  specified  as  his  distinguished  by 
brevity.  In  consequence  of  his  participation  in  it,  the 
book  might  fairly  have  been  termed  'Poems  by  Three 
Brothers.' 

The  later  celebrity  of  Tennyson  has  caused  an  excep- 
tional degree  of  curiosity  to  spring  up  about  this  petty 
volume.  There  are  indeed  circumstances  connected 
with  its  publication  which  invest  it  with  peculiar  inter- 
est, entirely  dissociated  from  the  matter  it  contains.- 
Though  the  boys  fancied  they  had  been  crossing  a 
Rubicon,  the  audacity  of  the  act  did  not  awaken  any 
surprise  or  astonishment  in  the  rest  of  the  world.  Men 
did  not  learn  of  it  at  the  time.  They  continued  much 
later  to  remain  in  ignorance  of  the  fact  that  any  Rubi- 
con existed  in  Lincolnshire  or  that  any  one  had  crossed 
it.  The  work  attracted  no  attention  worth  mentioning 
till  late  in  the  century.  Three  notices  of  it,  however, 
certainly  appeared.  They  are  all  more  or  less  per- 
functory. One  can  be  found  in  an  advertisement  of 
it  taken  from  'The  Sunday  Mercury'  of  April  22,  1827. 
This  spoke  of  it  as  "a  work,  which,  under  the  most 
retiring  title  contains  many  exquisite  pieces  of  verse." 
Another  criticism  appeared  in  'The  Literary  Chroni- 
cle and  "Weekly  Review'  of  May  19  of  this  same  year. 
This  was  one  of  several  weeklies  fated  soon  to  die, 


44  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

or  to  be  merged  ^vith  others,  which  about  that  time 
were  set  on  foot.  The  criticism  is  interesting  as 
expressing  no  opinion  in  a  genial  way.  "This  little 
volume, ' '  it  said, '  *  exhibits  a  pleasing  union  of  kindred 
tastes,  and  contains  several  little  pieces  of  considerable 
merit. ' '  It  quoted  two  poems  in  full.  One  of  them  was 
the  piece  beginning  with  the  line  'Yon  star  of  eve,  so 
soft  and  clear,'  and  the  other  entitled  'God's  Denun- 
ciations against  Pharaoh-Hophra. '  The  first  of  these 
is  thought  by  some  to  be  the  unindicated  fourth  poem 
of  Frederick  Tennyson. 

The  fullest  and  most  genuinely  cordial  of  these  three 
notices  was  that  contained  in  'The  Gentleman's  Maga- 
zine.'^ It  began  with  controverting  the  dictum  of  Dr. 
Johnson  that  no  book  was  ever  spared  out  of  tender- 
ness to  its  author.  "Why,"  it  continued,  "to  such  a 
volume  as  this  should  a  test  be  applied  which  should 
have  reference  only  to  high  pretensions  1  These  poems 
are  full  of  amiable  feelings,  expressed  for  the  most 
part  with  elegance  and  correctness — are  we  to  com- 
plain that  they  want  the  deep  feeling  of  a  Byron,  the 
polished  grace  of  Moore,  or  the  perfect  mastery  of 
human  passions  which  distinguishes  Crabbe?  We 
would  rather  express  our  surprise  and  admiration  that 
at  an  age  when  the  larger  class  of  mankind  have  barely 
reached  the  elements  of  thought,  so  much  of  good  feel- 
ing, united  to  the  poetical  expression  of  it,  should  be 
found  in  two  members  of  the  same  family.  The  vol- 
ume is  a  graceful  addition  to  our  domestic  poetry,  and 
does  credit  to  the  juvenile  Adelphi." 

1  Vol.  XCVII,  Supplement  to  Part  I,  p.  609. 


POEMS  BY  TWO  BROTHERS  45 

It  was  of  course  not  to  be  expected  that  the  work 
should  attract  even  so  much  as  the  little  attention  it 
received.  A  volume  of  poems  written  by  two  boys 
whose  names  were  not  given  on  the  title-page,  and 
brought  out  by  provincial  booksellers  in  a  small  coun- 
try town,  did  not  have  any  favoring  adventitious  cir- 
cumstances to  contribute  to  its  success.  The  collec- 
tion of  pieces,  though  in  a  certain  way  remarkable,  is 
not  so  very  remarkable.  Nor  indeed  is  it  so  very 
unusual.  Better  work  has  been  accomplished  at  this 
early  age  by  poets  who  have  turned  out  distinctly 
inferior  to  the  greater  of  the  two  brothers.  What  has 
justly  been  regarded  as  the  most  wonderful  thing 
about  the  volume  is  that  not  only  were  these  young 
writers  able  to  find  men  who  were  mlling  to  print  and 
publish  it  at  their  own  expense  but  to  pay  in  addition 
twenty  pounds  for  the  copyright.  To  the  boys  them- 
selves who  never  had  at  best  more  than  a  few  pence 
in  their  pockets  and  usually  nothing  at  all,  the  pos- 
session of  so  much  money  must  have  given  them  the 
feeling  of  having  come  into  the  possession  of  a  veri- 
table Golconda.  A  goodly  part  of  this  sum,  to  be  sure, 
was  taken  out  in  books.  But  the  fact  itself  is  justly 
regarded  as  one  of  the  most  astounding  stories  that 
can  be  told  of  the  relations  which  have  existed  between 
authors  and  publishers.  A  prosaic  explanation  of  this 
apparently  inexplicable  phenomenon  has  been  given 
on  the  ground  that  the  maternal  grandfather  of  the 
two  authors  had  been  vicar  of  Louth.  They  them- 
selves had  also  been  students  in  the  grammar  school 
of  the  place.     Accordingly,  though  the  grandfather 


46      LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

had  been  dead  long  before,  the  interest  of  his  person- 
ality would  still  continue  to  linger  about  the  efforts  of 
his  grandsons. 

This  explanation  has  been  called  very  rational.  All 
wonder  therefore  is  to  cease.  If  so,  the  rational  intel- 
lect works  very  differently  in  Lincolnshire  from  what 
it  does  in  the  rest  of  the  civilized  world.  In  the  latter 
it  takes  more  than  the  sale  of  a  work  among  a  large 
circle  of  personal  friends  to  repay  the  expense  of  pro- 
duction, even  when  the  author  has  achieved  some  repu- 
tation already.  The  likelihood  that  it  would  have  any 
effect  of  that  sort  in  the  circle  which  continued  to 
remember  a  grandfather  with  a  different  name,  who 
had  been  dead  for  several  years,  can  hardly  be  reck- 
oned as  justifying  an  experienced  man  of  business  in 
embarking  upon  any  such  venture.  There  may  have 
been  motives  which  influenced  the  Jacksons  in  the 
course  they  adopted  which  we  have  no  means  of  ascer- 
taining. If  it  were,  however,  a  business  transaction 
purely,  their  generosity  can  be  praised  only  at  the 
expense  of  their  sagacity.  It  is  doubtful — it  is  perhaps 
right  to  add,  it  is  not  doubtful — that  the  receipts  from 
the  sale  never  paid  them  even  for  the  price  of  the 
copyright,  to  say  nothing  of  the  other  expenses  of  the 
publication.  Fortunate  it  pretty  surely  was  for  the 
boys  that  they  fell  into  the  hands  of  provincial  book- 
sellers. Had  their  first  venture  been  with  a  London 
publisher,  instead  of  receiving  from  him  twenty 
pounds  for  the  copyright,  they  would  have  been  likely 
to  have  paid  him  instead  more  than  twenty  pounds  for 
bringing  out  the  book  at  all.     Even  then  he  would 


POEMS  BY  TWO  BROTHERS  47 

probably  have  lost  money  by  the  bargain.  At  any 
rate,  he  would  have  insisted  that  he  had,  which  so  far 
as  they  were  concerned  would  have  amounted  to  the 
same  thing. 

The  contents  of  the  volume  now  come  up  for  consid- 
eration. Like  the  work  of  most  young  and  precocious 
writers  belonging  to  the  educated  class,  it  was  char- 
acterized by  the  display  of  that  multifarious  learning, 
in  the  exhibition  of  which  boyhood  delights.  This 
was  scattered  over  its  pages  with  a  lavish  hand  in 
the  shape  of  mottoes,  footnotes,  and  quotations.  For 
most  of  these  Alfred  was  responsible.  Furthermore, 
like  the  work  of  all  young  writers,  it  reflected  the 
authors  who  were  their  favorites.  In  their  case  it 
reflected  the  work  of  a  great  many  authors,  for  the 
two  brothers  had  been  omnivorous  readers,  and  read- 
ers, almost  without  exception,  of  the  best  literature. 
Especially  was  this  true  of  the  younger.  Curious  is 
the  picture  which  the  citations  and  remarks  contained 
in  the  volume  present  of  the  tastes  and  occupations  of 
the  boys  in  that  secluded  Lincolnshire  home.  It  is 
worth  while  indeed  to  give  a  fairly  full,  though  not 
complete,  list  of  the  various  authors  mth  whom  they 
were  more  or  less  familiar ;  for  it  is  manifest  that  the 
references  and  quotations  are  usually  suggested  by 
their  o^\ti  reading  and  not  drawn  from  compendiums 
and  conventional  collections  of  '^elegant  extracts."  As 
was  to  be  expected,  the  classic  writers  were  strongly 
in  e^ddence.  Yet  in  Greek  but  two  of  these — Xenophon 
and  Apollonius  Rhodius — are  referred  to  directly, 
though  in  the  poems  themselves  familiarity  with  others 


48  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

is  manifested.  In  Latin,  however,  there  is  a  far  larger 
display  of  authors  and  titles.  They  come  too  from 
both  early  and  late  periods  of  the  literature.  Lucre- 
tius, Terence,  Sallust,  Cicero,  Horace,  Virgil,  Ovid, 
Tacitus,  Suetonius,  Juvenal,  Martial,  ^lius  Lamprid- 
ius,  and  Claudian  are  the  names  of  those  to  whom 
direct  reference  is  made  or  indebtedness  professed. 
Even  the  Latin  poems  of  Gray  are  drawn  upon. 

In  the  modern  tongues  there  is  the  same  wealth  of 
boyish  erudition  displayed.  France  furnishes  quota- 
tions from  Racine  and  Rousseau.  Even  Spanish 
authors  are  cited.  But  naturally  the  English  writers 
present  the  most  formidable  array  of  names.  Among 
the  poets  are  found  Spenser,  Shakespeare,  Milton, 
Young,  Mason,  Beattie,  Cowper,  Ossian,  Scott,  Moore, 
and  Byron.  Among  the  prose  writers  are  Addison, 
Burke,  and  Mrs.  Radcliffe.  The  historians  are  repre- 
sented by  Hume  and  Gibbon.  There  are  quotations 
from  less  distinguished  names  which  need  not  be  con- 
sidered here.  The  works  of  the  great  oriental  scholar, 
Sir  William  Jones,  are,  however,  worth  mentioning, 
because  they  seem  to  have  been  specially  favored  by 
the  younger  brother.  But  besides  direct  references, 
it  is  easy  to  detect  in  the  poems  themselves  imitations 
of  writers  who  are  not  specifically  mentioned.  It  is 
a  common  remark  that  in  this  volume  the  influence  of 
Byron  is  predominant.  At  the  time  the  book  came 
out,  that  result  might  surely  have  been  anticipated; 
for  in  the  minds  of  most  Byron  still  continued  to  be 
the  predominating  force  in  English  poetry.  Within 
certain  bounds,  accordingly,  it  may  be  conceded  that 


POEMS  BY  TWO  BROTHERS  49 

the  statement  is  true.  There  is  in  the  production  of 
the  younger  brother  a  manifest  imitation  of  particular 
poems  of  that  author  whose  recent  death  had  deepened 
the  impression  created  by  his  brilliant  career.  This 
fact  is  especially  noticeable  in  the  case  of  certain  con- 
templative pieces  about  the  future  life;  and  we  may 
feel  confident  that  the  expedition  of  Nadir  Shah  into 
Hindostan  would  never  have  been  written  by  Alfred 
Tennyson,  had  not  the  Assyrian  previously  come  dowTi 
like  the  wolf  on  the  fold.  But  even  here  the  influence  of 
Byron  is  not  exclusive.  There  are  lines  in  the  poem 
plainly  reminiscent  of  the  'LochiePs  Warning'  of 
Campbell. 

More  marked,  however,  than  the  character  of  the 
subjects  and  the  form  of  versification  is  the  spirit 
which  pervades  several  of  these  imitations.  Especially 
is  it  noticeable  in  those  written  by  the  elder  brother. 
In  Byron  the  posing  for  effect  which  now  strikes  us  as 
so  unreal  had  something  of  a  basis  in  genuine  feeling 
on  his  part,  or  at  any  rate,  in  what  he  believed  to  be 
genuine  feeling.  But  with  his  imitators  the  posing 
was  the  only  thing  that  was  genuine  at  all.  In  the 
case  of  these  two  writers  it  had  about  it  under  the  cir- 
cumstances almost  an  air  of  the  comic.  It  is  perhaps 
natural  for  a  boy  to  write  gloomy  poetry;  to  pretend 
to  be  blase  before  he  has  really  known  what  pleasure 
is;  to  complain  of  blighted  affections  before  he  could 
have  learned  by  experience  the  meaning  of  that  pre- 
liminary process  of  acquiring  them  which  we  term 
falling  in  love;  to  find  the  grave  casting  its  gloomy 
shadow  over  life  at  the  very  age  when  life  is  abound- 


50  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

ing  and  fairly  exultant  in  freshness  and  vigor.  It 
seems  for  some  reason  to  be  always  natural;  at  that 
particular  period  Byron  had  made  it  fashionable. 

But  in  the  case  of  these  young  authors  the  unreality 
of  this  attitude  is  peculiarly  unreal.  The  man  of  the 
world  can  hardly  be  expected  to  refrain  from  smiling 
when  a  boy  of  sixteen  or  seventeen  begins  to  talk  about 
the  flowers  of  youth  as  having  faded  in  spite  of  sor- 
row's tears.  He  might  feel  justified  in  laughing  when 
a  well-brought  up  lad,  still  a  good  way  from  having 
reached  the  end  of  his  teens — whose  greatest  iniquity 
is  likely  to  have  been  the  twisting  of  a  knocker  from  a 
door  or  ringing  a  bell  and  running  away — when  so  mild 
a  scapegrace  as  this  should  announce  in  all  seriousness 
that  it  is  a  fearful  thing  for  him  to  glance  back  over 
the  gloom  of  misspent  years  and  to  have  his  mind 
filled  with  a  thousand  terrors  as  he  sees  advancing  the 
shado-v\y  forms  of  guilt,  and  the  vices  of  his  life 
stand  portrayed  before  him  mthout  a  gleam  of  hope 
to  cheer  his  old  and  aching  eyes.  This  is  pretty  strong 
language  for  a  veteran  sinner ;  but  it  is  hopelessly  out 
of  place  in  the  mouth  of  a  boy  w^ho  had  never  dreamed 
of  committing  a  crime  of  even  respectable  turpitude, 
still  less  of  perpetrating  a  deed  of  flagrant  atrocity.  It 
may  be  said  that  this  is  merely  a  dramatic  picture. 
The  writer  accordingly  is  not  to  be  held  responsible 
for  the  views  his  characters  express.  But  even  in  the 
case  of  these  supposed  characters  the  language  has  an 
air  of  unreality.  The  impression  produced  is  that  of 
feelings  which  no  man  had  ever  experienced  in  any 
form,  and  which  these  boys  could  never  have  conceived 


I 


POEMS  BY  TWO  BROTHERS  51 

of,  unless  influenced  by  an  imagination  inspired  by 
vagne  recollections  of  what  they  had  read. 

But  as  has  been  intimated,  this  kind  of  writing  char- 
acterizes the  work  of  the  elder  brother  rather  than  that 
of  the  younger.  Throughout,  this  diiference  between 
the  nature  of  their  respective  contributions  had  been 
recognized  by  the  writers  themselves.  In  their  so- 
called  advertisement  they  intimate  that  their  produc- 
tions are  not  alike  either  in  style  or  matter.  This  is 
apparent  to  even  the  casual  reader.  The  difference 
between  the  poetry  of  the  two  authors  extends  not 
merely  to  the  treatment  of  their  subjects,  but  to  the 
subjects  themselves.  This  the  very  titles  show. 
Persia,  Mexico,  The  Fall  of  Jerusalem,  Mithridates, 
Berenice,  Antony  and  Cleopatra  are  the  themes  upon 
which  the  younger  brother  dilates.  These  are  not  the 
sort  of  subjects  which  interested  Charles.  Equally 
marked  is  the  difference  in  the  manner  of  their  treat- 
ment. In  that  respect  the  productions  of  the  two  are 
as  divergent  as  two  streams  forming  a  junction,  which 
have  come  from  entirely  different  regions  and  carry 
with  them  the  traces  of  different  soils.  Charles  had 
none  of  the  intricate  variations  of  verse  or  peculiari- 
ties of  diction  which,  even  at  that  early  age,  had  begun 
to  characterize  the  workmanship  of  his  younger 
brother.  His  writing  is  usually  simple,  clear,  and  with 
an  almost  fatal  tendency  to  the  commonplace.  Certain 
of  his  poems,  in  truth,  such  as  'Sunday  Mobs'  and 
'Phrenology,'  are  hopelessly  prosaic.  The  influence  of 
Byron  was  far  more  disastrously  potent  in  his  case 
than  in  that  of  Alfred.     It  is  in  his  poems  that  the 


52  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

posing  attitude  is  prominent.  It  is  he  who  is  racked 
by  remorse  for  crimes  never  committed.  It  is  he  who 
looks  back  upon  a  career  of  blighted  hopes  and  sinful 
deeds.  One  of  his  pieces  is  entitled  'In  Early  Youth 
I  Lost  my  Sire.'  As  a  result  of  this  misfortune,  he 
tells  us,  his  soul  had  been  torn  by  every  blast  of  vice. 
By  such  lines  as  the  following  he  not  only  harrows  our 
feelings,  but  proceeds  to  enhance  the  extent  of  his 
misfortune  by  using  italics : 

Why  lowers  my  brow,  dost  thou  enquire? 
Why  burns  mine  eye  with  feverish  fire? 
With  hatred  now,  and  now  with  ire? 
In  early  youth  I  lost  my  sire. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  we  know  that  the  Tennysons  at 
this  time  had  not  lost  their  sire.  Further,  as  a  matter 
of  theory,  we  are  pretty  safe  in  asserting  that  in  minds 
ordinarily  constituted  no  direful  results  of  the  kind 
here  denoted  follow  from  the  loss  of  one's  sire  which 
w^ould  not  have  followed  had  the  sire  continued  to 
exist. 

But  it  is  to  be  said  that  in  the  pieces  of  Alfred 
Tennyson  which  here  most  distinctively  indicate  the 
features  of  his  future  poetry,  there  is  even  at  this  early 
day  comparatively  little  trace  of  the  influence  of  Byron. 
What  there  is  of  it,  if  not  that  of  Byron  at  his  best, 
is  certainly  not  that  of  him  at  his  worst.  In  several  of 
the  more  important  pieces  which  the  younger  brother 
contributed  to  this  volume,  the  influence  of  the  earlier 
poet  can  hardly  be  detected  at  all.  Fully  as  noticeable, 
certainly,  are  the  imitations,  conscious  or  unconscious, 


POEMS  BY  TWO  BROTHERS  53 

of  Scott  and  Campbell.  Perhaps  even  more  directly 
marked  than  any  others  are  the  passages  that  owe 
their  existence  to  the  poetry  of  Gray.  There  are  lines 
which  are  obviously  inspired  by  some  of  those  con- 
tained in  that  writer's  Uvo  Pindaric  odes — ^inspired 
not  in  the  sense  of  being  borrowed  but  in  that  of  being 
suggested.  In  truth,  the  wide  reading  of  the  younger 
brother  comes  out  distinctly  in  his  verse  as  contrasted 
with  the  little  display  of  it  by  the  elder,  even  if  the 
latter  had  been  as  remarkable  for  its  possession  as  his 
associate.  The  difference  between  the  two  in  this  par- 
ticular is  another  easy  method  of  distinguishing  the 
authorship  of  the  respective  pieces.  But  in  truth,  he 
who  had  become  thoroughly  steeped  in  Tennyson's 
later  diction  and  method  of  expression  would  never 
experience  much  difficulty  in  designating  a  very  large 
proportion  of  the  pieces  in  this  volume  for  which  he 
was  responsible.  In  these  first  writings  of  the  poet 
occur  not  unfrequently  the  compound  adjectives  which 
later  much  distressed  the  critics  of  his  early  work. 
Even  here  are  to  be  found  such  expressions,  for  exam- 
ple, as  Vapor-mantled,  earth-imbedded,  soul-enchant- 
ing, and  greenly-tangled.  In  them,  too,  was  exhibited 
that  fondness  for  the  archaic  which  led  Tennyson  later 
to  revive  words  and  phrases  which  had  gone  out  of  use, 
and  for  which  he  came  constantly  to  be  charged  mth 
affectation.  Especially  noticeable  in  the  work  of  a 
writer,  then  only  a  young  boy,  is  the  use  of  the  prefix 
y  to  the  past  participle.  From  all  vagaries  of  this 
sort — if  we  choose  to  call  them  vagaries — his  brother 
Charles  was  thoroughly  free. 


54  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

Though  the  younger  brother's  poems  were  fewer  in 
number  than  those  of  the  elder,  as  a  consequence  of 
the  greater  length  of  his  pieces,  he  contributed  to  the 
joint  volume  much  the  larger  proportion  of  lines.  But 
as  may  be  inferred  from  what  has  been  said,  far  more 
did  he  surpass  him  in  quality  of  verse.  There  has  been 
a  disposition  to  sneer  at  the  work  accomplished  in  his 
boyhood  by  the  future  poet.  Tennyson  himself  was  at 
one  time  disposed  to  depreciate  it.  He  called  it  his 
''early  rot."  But  when  towards  the  close  of  his  life 
he  came  to  examine  it,  he  admitted  that  it  was  better 
than  he  had  thought.  It  has  been  no  infrequent  state- 
ment on  the  part  of  others — usually  indeed  of  those 
who  have  not  prejudiced  their  minds  by  reading  this 
volume— that  what  appeared  in  it  gives  no  promise 
whatever  of  his  later  achievement.  The  assertion 
indeed  has  sometimes  been  made  by  those  who  have 
professed  to  pay  special  attention  to  the  work  itself. 
We  have  been  told  in  an  article  on  the  bibliography  of 
Tennyson  that  ''we  may  safely  assert  that  the  most 
intense  student  of  the  Laureate  might  read  this  vol- 
ume through  without  the  faintest  suspicion  of  its 
alleged  authorship. ' "  In  one  sense  this  might  be  said 
of  the  early  production  of  any  great  author.  The  art, 
what  there  is  of  it,  of  boys  whose  ages  range  anywhere 
between  sixteen  and  twenty,  is  fairly  sure  to  be  imita- 
tive. It  is  not  in  such  pieces  that  we  expect  to  see  any 
striking  mastery  of  technique  or  display  of  profound 
thought  or  intense  feeling,  and  above  all  of  those  char- 
acteristics which  mark  peculiarly  the  expression  of 

1 '  Fortnightly  Eeview, '  Vol.  II,  p.  386. 


POEMS  BY  TWO  BROTHERS  55 

the  mature  man  as  contrasted  with  the  imitation  con- 
sciously or  unconsciously  practised  by  the  immature. 
It  may  be  remarked,  however,  that  the  suspicion  of  a 
very  intense  student  of  Tennyson  might  be  aroused 
by  finding  an  occasional  line  in  the  early  poems  essen- 
tially reproduced  in  his  later  works. 

This  fact,  however,  carries  but  little  weight  when  we 
come  to  discuss  the  nature  and  value  of  the  poetry. 
The  thorough  commonplaceness  of  Tennyson's  work 
in  this  volume  has  been  insisted  upon  by  men  who  can 
hardly  plead,  who  at  least  ought  not  to  plead,  that 
impartiality  of  judgment  which  arises  from  ignorance. 
So  acute  a  critic  as  the  late  Andrew  Lang  took  the 
ground  in  one  of  his  essays  that  the  early  work  of  great 
poets  is  never  better  than  that  of  ordinary  men — a 
thesis  pretty  difficult  to  maintain  in  the  face  of  certain 
writers,  such,  for  example,  as  some  of  Cowley's  pieces 
written  in  boyhood,  or  Milton's  'Nati\dty  Ode,'  or 
Pope's  'Essay  on  Criticism.'  To  sustain  his  view  he 
cited  among  others  the  case  of  Tennyson.  ''There 
is  no  promise  at  all,"  he  wrote,  "in  the  Tennysons' 
'Poems  by  Two  Brothers.'  "^  This  is  negative  dis- 
paragement; but  for  positive  failure  to  exhibit  the 
least  sign  of  literary  judgment  we  can  have  recourse 
to  another  critic.  Of  the  'Poems  by  Two  Brothers' 
Stopford  Brooke  tells  us  that  "they  are  mthout  a 
trace  of  originality,  force,  or  freshness — faded  imita- 
tions of  previous  poets,  chiefly  of  Byron;  or,  where 
not  imitative,  full  of  the  futile  modesty  of  boyhood, 

1  On  'Genius  in  Children,'  in  'North  American  Eeview, '  January, 
1897,  Vol.  CLXIV,  p.  36. 


56  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

which  would  fain  be  vain  but  does  not  dare ;  made  up 
partly  of  bold  noise  and  partly  of  sentimentality,  accu- 
rately true  to  the  tjq^e  of  English  poetry  between  the 
death  of  Shelley  and  the  publication  of  the  Tennyson 
volume  of  1830."  It  is  further  remarked  that  ''it  is 
one  of  the  literary  puzzles  of  the  world  that  certain 
great  poets,  as,  for  example,  Shelley,  and  here  Tenny- 
son, write  trash  in  their  boyhood ;  and  within  a  year  or 
two  step  on  to  a  level  of  original  power.  "^  Examples 
such  as  these  show  that  in  the  production  of  foolish 
criticism  no  limitations  are  imposed  by  age. 

This  is  not  to  say  that  Tennyson's  productions  in 
the  'Poems  by  Two  Brothers'  are  to  be  regarded  as 
highly  remarkable.  It  would  be  an  assumption  not 
justified  by  the  character  of  the  pieces  found  in  this 
volume  to  maintain  that  they  gave  certain  indication  of 
the  advent  of  a  great  poetic  genius.  Had  not  the 
promise  here  disclosed  been  followed  by  great  per- 
formance, these  poems  would  have  remained  in  the 
oblivion  into  which  they  speedily  fell;  or  rather  into 
the  oblivion  into  which  they  were  born,  outside  of  the 
immediate  circle  of  friends  or  relatives  who  were  prob- 
ably their  sole  readers.  But  to  say  that  there  is  no 
promise  at  all  shows  either  ignorance  of  their  content 
or  a  wilful  closing  of  the  eyes  to  the  fact.  There  are 
several  of  the  younger  poet's  pieces  which  are  far 
from  being  poor  productions  in  themselves.  "I  did 
not  expect  to  find  them  so  good  as  they  really  are," 
said  Frederick  Tennyson  in  the  passage  of  a  letter 

1 '  Tennyson,  His  Art  and  Eelation  to  Modern  Life, '  by  Stopf ord 
Augustus  Brooke,  1894,  p.  55. 


POEMS  BY  TWO  BROTHERS  57 

quoted  in  the  reprint  of  1893.  His  praise  seems  to  have 
been  given  to  all  of  them ;  that  it  has  sufficient  warrant 
in  the  case  of  Alfred  may  be  shown  by  a  few  extracts. 
The  first  consists  of  two  stanzas  taken  from  a  poem 
entitled  'The  Vale  of  Bones.'  It  is  the  picture  of  a 
valley  between  mountains  strewn  with  the  bones  of 
those  who  had  fallen  in  battle : 

I  knew  thera  all — a  gallant  band, 
The  glory  of  their  native  land, 
And  on  each  lordly  brow  elate 
Sate  valour  and  contempt  of  fate. 
Fierceness  of  youth,  and  scorn  of  foe. 
And  pride  to  render  blow  for  blow. 
In  the  strong  war's  tumultuous  crash, 
How  darkly  did  their  keen  eyes  flash ! 
How  fearlessly  each  arm  was  rais  'd ! 
How  dazzlingly  each  broad-sword  blaz  'd ! 
Though  now  the  dreary  night-breeze  moans 
•  Above  them  in  this  Vale  of  Bones. 

What  lapse  of  time  shall  sweep  away 
The  memory  of  that  gallant  day, 
When  on  to  battle  proudly  going. 
Your  plumage  to  the  wild  winds  blowing. 
Your  tartans  far  behind  ye  flowing, 
Your  pennons  rais'd,  your  clarions  sounding, 
Fiercely  your  steeds  beneath  ye  bounding. 
Ye  mix'd  the  strife  of  warring  foes 
In  fiery  shock  and  deadly  close? 
What  stampings  in  the  madd'ning  strife, 
What  thrusts,  what  stabs,  with  brand  and  knife. 
What  desp'rate  strokes  for  death  or  life, 
Were  there  !    What  cries,  what  thrilling  groans. 
Re-echo 'd  thro'  the  Vale  of  Bones! 


58  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

No  one  can  well  deny  the  force  or  fire  of  this  passage, 
when  we  take  into  account  that  it  comes  from  a  boy  of 
sixteen  or  seventeen.  It  assuredly  indicated  the  possi- 
ble, though  of  course  not  certain,  development  of  poetic 
power  of  no  mean  order.  This  promise  is  brought  out 
more  unmistakably  in  the  following  stanza  from  the 
poem  entitled  'Antony  to  Cleopatra': 

Then  when  the  shriekings  of  the  dying 

Were  heard  along  the  wave, 
Soul  of  my  soul !    I  saw  thee  flying ; 

I  follow 'd  thee,  to  save. 
The  thunders  of  the  brazen  prows 

O'er  Actium's  ocean  rung; 
Fame's  garland  faded  from  my  brows, 

Her  wreath  away  I  flung. 
I  sought,  I  saw,  I  heard  but  thee ; 
For  what  to  love  was  victory? 

Of  an  entirely  different  cast  from  either  of  these  is 
the  poem  entitled  '  Persia. '  In  it  is  depicted  the  grief 
of  the  founder  of  the  empire  could  he  have  foreseen 
its  fall.  In  so  doing  the  writer  describes  in  the  follow- 
ing lines  the  extent  of  the  domain  whose  fate  he 
bewails : 

To  view  the  setting  of  that  star. 
Which  beam'd  so  gorgeously  and  far 
O'er  Anatolia  and  the  fane 
Of  Belus,  and  Cai'ster's  plain, 

And  Sardis,  and  the  glittering  sands 

Of  bright  Pactolus,  and  the  lands 
Where  Croesus  held  his  rich  domain: 
On  fair  Diarbeck's  land  of  spice, 
Adiabene's  plains  of  rice. 


POEMS  BY  TWO  BROTHERS  59 

Where  down  th'  Euphrates,  swift  and  strong, 
The  shield-like  kuphars  bound  along; 
And  sad  Cunaxa's  field,  where,  mixing 

With  host  to  adverse  host  oppos'd, 
'Mid  clashing  shield  and  spear  transfixing, 

The  rival  brothers  sternly  elos'd. 
And  further  east,  where,  broadly  roll'd. 
Old  Indus  pours  his  stream  of  gold; 
And  there  where,  tumbling  deep  and  hoarse, 
Blue  Ganga  leaves  her  vaccine  source; 
Loveliest  of  all  the  lovely  streams 
That  meet  immortal  Titan's  beams. 
And  smile  upon  their  fruitful  way 
Beneath  his  golden  orient  ray: 
And  southward  to  Cilicia's  shore. 
Where  Cydnus  meets  the  billows'  roar, 
And  where  the  Syrian  gates  divide 
The  meeting  realms  on  either  side; 
E  'en  to  the  land  of  Nile,  whose  crops 

Bloom  rich  beneath  his  bounteous  swell, 

To  hot  Syene's  wondrous  well. 
Nigh  to  the  long-liv'd  JEthiops. 
And  northward  far  to  Trebizonde, 

Renoun'd  for  kings  of  chivalry. 
Near  where  old  Hyssus,  from  the  strand, 

Disgorges  in  the  Euxine  sea — 
The  Euxine,  falsely  nam'd,  which  whelms 

The  mariner  in  the  heaving  tide. 
To  high  Sinope's  distant  realms, 

Whence  cynics  rail'd  at  human  pride. 

These  lines  are  not  merely  remarkable  for  the  mastery 
of  historical  and  geographical  detail  they  exhibit  but 
for  the  skill  manifested  in  marshalling  an  almost  Mil- 
tonic  wealth  of  nomenclature.    It  is  easy  to  pick  out 


60  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

flaws ;  but  a  boy  of  sixteen  or  seventeen  who  had  come 
into  the  possession  of  the  knowledge  here  displayed, 
and  had  the  ability  to  couch  it  in  such  vivid  verse,  has 
achieved  something  of  a  distinctly  higher  grade  than 
ordinary  and  even  excellent  versifiers  could  produce  at 
a  mature  age.^  It  would  be  no  difficult  matter  to  add 
other  extracts  as  significant.  These  are  enough,  how- 
ever, to  show  that  the  undeveloped  Tennyson  is  already 
indicated.  There  is  in  them  distinct  poetic  promise, 
though  one  may  be  perfectly  willing  to  concede  that 
there  has  been  much  poetic  promise  in  the  world  fully 
equal  to  it  which  has  never  ripened  into  performance. 
It  may  be  well  to  give  some  further  information 
about  this  volume,  though  this  concerns  bibliography 
rather  than  literary  history.  The  manuscript  of  the 
poems  chanced  to  be  saved  from  the  destruction  which 
usually  overtakes  the  writings  of  unknown  authors 
after  their  works  have  once  gone  to  the  press.  On 
December  23,  1892,  it  was  sold  in  London  by  auction.* 
It  brought  the  sum  of  £480.  Included  in  the  sale,  how- 
ever, was  a  copy  of  the  printed  volume,  then  com- 
manding the  price  of  about  thirty  pounds  in  the 
market,  and  also  the  receipt  for  the  twenty  pounds 
paid  by  the  Jacksons  for  the  copyright.  The  manu- 
script itself  was  sold  a  few  months  later  to  an  Ameri- 
can firm  for  £420.^  In  this  country  it  remained  for  a 
while,  but  before  it  was  disposed  of  here,  it  was  re- 

1  "This  is  not  perfect  poetry,"  says  Dr.  Van  Dyke  (in  'The  Poetry 
of  Tennyson'),  after  quoting  this  passage  from  this  poem;  "but  it  is 
certainly  strong  verse.  It  is  glorified  nomenclature.  Milton  himself 
need  not  have  blushed  to  acknowledge  it. ' ' 

2  '  Athenasum, '  December  31,  1892,  p.  922. 

3 'Notes  and  Queries,'  June  3,  1893,  p.  426. 


POEMS  BY  TWO  BROTHERS  61 

turned  to  England  and  found  a  proper  resting-place 
in  the  library  of  Trinity  College,  Cambridge/  Exami- 
nation of  the  manuscript  showed  that  all  its  contents 
had  for  some  reason  not  been  published.  To  the 
reprint  of  the  original  edition  made  in  1893,  four  short 
poems  were  added  which  had  been  omitted  from  the 
first  edition. 

It  is  not  a  matter  of  particular  consequence,  but  it 
is  proper  to  remark  in  passing  that  this  volume  of  the 
two  brothers  has  not  unfrequently  been  spoken  of  in 
recent  times  as  belonging  to  the  year  1826  instead  of 
1827.  A  statement  to  that  effect  has  been  made,  for 
instance,  in  some  biographies  of  the  poet.  In  other 
works  a  sort  of  compromise  has  been  arranged  between 
the  actual  and  the  supposed  fact  by  designating  the 
volume  as  that  of  1826-1827.  For  the  error  Tennyson 
himself  was  originally  responsible.  Strictly  speaking, 
a  writer  ought  to  know  better  than  any  one  else  just 
when  a  book  of  his  own  came  out.  Rarely  is  it  the 
case,  however,  that  he  can  be  trusted  implicitly. 
Least  of  all  is  it  true  when  he  has  produced  a  long 
succession  of  works.  In  this  instance  assuredly  the 
author  cannot  be  trusted.  The  truth  is  that  Tennyson 
came  to  confound  in  later  life  the  circumstances  con- 
nected with  the  dating  of  his  second  independent  vol- 
ume of  poetry  \\dth  those  of  the  volume  which  he  had 
brought  out  in  conjunction  with  his  brother.  The 
former  appeared  early  in  December,  1832.  It  was 
postdated,  however,  1833.  Lapse  of  time  with  its 
unfailing  concomitant  of  a  treacherous  memory  led  the 

1  Ibid.,  September  9,  1893,  p.  218. 


62  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

poet  to  transfer  to  the  earlier  work  what  was  true  of 
the  later.  The  'Poems  by  Two  Brothers'  came  out  in 
April,  1827.  The  so-called  advertisement  prefixed 
bears  the  date  of  the  preceding  March.  'The  London 
Daily  Chronicle'  of  April  27,  announces  it  as  that  day 
published.  It  is  advertised  in  'The  Literary  Gazette' 
of  April  21  and  April  28,  though  it  does  not  appear  in 
its  list  of  new  books  until  the  number  for  May  12. 
This  is  sufficient  evidence,  though  more  could  be  easily 
supplied. 


CHAPTER  III 
UNIVERSITY  LIFE 

It  was  about  ten  months  after  their  poetical  venture 
that  Charles  and  Alfred  Tennyson  went  to  Cambridge 
University.  Both  were  matriculated  at  Trinity  Col- 
lege. To  be  exact,  the  date  was  February  20,  1828. 
There  they  had  been  preceded  by  their  eldest  brother 
Frederick.  He  had  gone  up  from  Eton  where  he  had 
distinguished  himself  as  a  most  successful  writer  of 
Greek  and  Latin  verse.  At  Cambridge  he  had  already 
made  a  still  further  reputation  for  himself  by  gaining 
the  university  medal  for  the  best  Greek  poem. 

With  most  persons  poetically  inclined  a  little  mathe- 
matics goes  a  long  way,  and  Cambridge  had  then  long 
been  and  still  continued  to  be  the  most  mathematical 
of  universities.  Excellence  in  that  subject  was  essen- 
tial to  the  attainment  of  the  highest  honors.  Yet 
never  has  it  fallen  to  the  lot  of  any  institution  of 
learning — at  least  in  English-speaking  lands — to  have 
on  its  rolls  so  large  a  number  of  illustrious  men  of 
letters,  most  of  whom  knew  little  of  that  special  sub- 
ject and  some  of  whom  hated  it.  From  this  most 
mathematical  of  universities  had  been  graduated  be- 
fore Tennyson  was  born  a  large  majority  of  the  great- 
est poets  of  England.  In  literature,  there  was  to  be  no 
falling  off  in  the  period  which  immediately  followed. 


64  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

In  the  course  of  the  third  decade  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury, particularly,  appeared  at  the  university  a  most 
remarkable  body  of  men.  In  the  early  part  of  it 
Macaulay  was  graduated.  During  his  first  residence 
he  expressed  his  feelings  about  the  studies  pursued  in 
a  letter  to  his  mother  signed  ''your  most  miserable 
and  mathematical  son."  In  the  middle  of  this  same 
decade  Bulwer  and  Winthrop  Mackworth  Praed  were 
prominent;  and  a  little  later  Frederick  Denison 
Maurice,  John  Sterling,  and  shortly  after  them, 
Charles  Buller.  But  towards  its  end  came  together 
in  the  university,  and,  as  it  chanced,  mainly  in  a  single 
one  of  its  colleges,  a  group  of  men  each  of  whom  was 
to  achieve  more  or  less  distinction  in  the  period  which 
w^as  to  follow.  Two  of  them  have  attained  eminence 
for  all  time ;  but  every  one  of  the  others  has  played  no 
inconspicuous  part  in  the  intellectual  life  of  the  nine- 
teenth century. 

The  two  greatest  never  completed  the  course. 
Tennyson  remained  but  three  years,  Thackeray  but 
one.  Yet  there  were  several  others  then  congregated 
there  who  were  destined  to  be  of  note  and  force  in 
their  generation.  Two  of  the  now  less  known  to  the 
public  of  the  circle  of  which  the  poet  became  a  mem- 
ber were  the  future  preacher,  William  Henry  Brook- 
field,  whom  Thackeray  described  as  Frank  Whitestock 
in  'The  Curate's  Walk';  and  the  future  barrister  and 
journalist,  George  Stovin  Venables,  upon  whose  char- 
acter— not  upon  whose  career — the  same  novelist  is 
generally  asserted  to  have  modelled  the  Warrington 
of  '  Pendennis. '    However  that  may  be,  he  has  the  dis- 


UNIVERSITY  LIFE  65 

tinction  of  ha\ang  contributed  one  cautionary  line  to 
'The  Princess.'^  Another  one  of  the  number  was 
Klinglake,  not  so  likely  to  be  remembered  hereafter  by 
his  history  of  the  Crimean  War,  weighted  do^vn  with 
infinite  information  on  the  pettiest  topics,  as  by  that 
brilliant  book  of  travels,  the  glory  of  which  is  that  it 
gives  no  information  at  all.  Both  Thackeray  and 
Kinglake  belonged  to  Trinity ;  but  with  neither  of  them 
at  that  time  could  Tennyson's  acquaintance  have  been 
more  than  nominal,  if  it  even  existed.  Nor  did  he  then 
consort  with  FitzGerald,  with  whom  later  his  relations 
were  to  become  specially  intimate.  Furthermore,  it 
was  not  till  the  close  of  his  stay  that  he  met  Trench, 
the  future  archbishop  of  Dublin.  To  his  more  imme- 
diate  circle  of  associates,  besides  the  tw^o  already  men- 
tioned, belonged  Henry  Alford,  the  future  dean  of 
Canterbury ;  Charles  Merivale,  the  future  historian  of 
the  Roman  Empire ;  James  Spedding,  the  future  editor 
of  Bacon ;  Richard  Monckton  Milnes,  the  future  Lord 
Houghton;  and  last,  though  so  far  as  the  poet  is 
concerned,  of  greatest  importance,  Arthur  Henry 
Hallam. 

It  is  clear  that  at  the  outset  there  was  much  in  his 
surroundings  which  was  little  to  the  poet's  taste.  The 
high  position  accorded  to  mathematics  in  the  course 
of  study  w^ould  not  be  likely  to  recommend  either  the 
institution  or  those  seeking  its  honors  to  the  regard  of 

1  This  was  the  second  line  of  the  speech  of  '  The  Princess '  at  the 
beginning  of  Canto  IV: 

There  sinks  the  nebulous  star  we  call  the  Sun, 
If  that  hypothesis  of  theirs  be  sound. 


66  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

one  who  was  devoted  above  all  things  else  to  literature. 
A  letter  written  to  an  aunt  early  in  his  university 
career  reveals  his  dissatisfied  state  of  mind.  ''I  know 
not  how  it  is,"  he  says,  ''but  I  feel  isolated  here  in 
the  midst  of  society.  The  country  is  disgustingly 
level,  the  revelry  of  the  place  so  monotonous,  the  stud- 
ies of  the  university  so  uninteresting,  so  much  matter 
of  fact.  None  but  dry-headed,  calculating,  angular 
little  gentlemen  can  take  much  delight  in  them."^ 
Fortunately  these  feelings  did  not  continue.  Still  it  is 
evident  that  while  Tennyson  was  in  his  way  an  earnest 
student,  it  was  not  in  the  way  which  led  to  college 
honors.  His  acquaintance,  however,  was  not  confined 
to  the  dry-headed,  calculating,  angular  little  gentlemen 
of  whom  he  seemed  at  first  to  think  the  university  was 
made  up.  These  adjectives  would  be  especially  inap- 
plicable to  the  group  of  young  men  already  mentioned 
with  whom  he  became  intimate,  all  of  whom  were  pro- 
foundly affected  by  the  feelings  of  literary  and  politi- 
cal unrest  which  were  then  dominant  everywhere. 

For  the  Tennysons  came  up  to  Cambridge  and  con- 
tinued to  remain  there  during  the  period  of  excite- 
ment and  agitation  which  was  then  prevailing  over 
England  and  the  Continent.  While  it  lasted  not  only 
were  kings  dynastic  and  literary  sent  into  exile,  but 
thrones  of  every  kind  were  to  a  greater  or  less  extent 
shaken.  More  than  its  sister  university,  Cambridge 
felt  stirring  in  itself  the  intellectual  revolt  which 
sought  to  dethrone  the  old  divinities  and  to  substitute 
for  them  new  gods.    Two  men,  in  particular,  both  con- 

1  'Memoir,'  Vol.  I,  p.  34. 


UNIVERSITY  LIFE  67 

nected  with  the  educational  staff  of  Trinity  College, 
were  regarded  as  the  prophetic  interpreters  of  the 
new  creed.  One  was  Julius  Charles  Hare,  who  was 
classical  lecturer  from  1822  to  1832.  The  other  was 
Connop  Thirlwall,  the  future  historian  and  bishop  of 
St.  Da\dd's.  At  the  time  of  Tennyson's  residence 
these  two  were  engaged  in  the  translation  of  Niebuhr  's 
'History  of  Rome.'  This  work  was  then  regarded  by 
many  as  of  a  revolutionary  character  and  as  having  a 
tendency  to  promote  skepticism.  Of  the  two,  Hare 
had  much  the  more  influence  with  the  members  of  the 
younger  set  in  whose  brains  were  fermenting  the  new 
literary  and  social  ideas  which  were  in  the  air.  With 
many  of  them  he  was  on  terms  of  intimacy.  As  he  was 
by  nature  extravagant  both  in  his  likes  and  dislikes, 
he  was  fairly  sure  to  be  found  an  ardent  friend  or  a 
furious  foe.  One  result  of  this  temperament  was  that 
he  was  little  able  to  form  a  trustworthy  estimate  of  the 
comparative  value  of  persons  or  productions.  An 
incidental  remark  of  his  made  in  all  sincerity  fur- 
nishes a  striking  illustration  of  this  critical  wayward- 
ness. In  1832  he  was  at  Munich.  There  he  saw  Schel- 
ling.  That  philosopher,  he  added,  ''now  that  Goethe 
and  Niebuhr  are  gone,  is  A^dthout  a  rival  the  first  man 
of  the  age, — I  know  not  who  is  the  second."^  It  is  not 
necessary  to  quarrel  mth  this  estimate  of  Schelling. 
It  was  not  an  unnatural  view  for  a  metaphysician  to 
take.  It  is  the  junction  of  Goethe  and  Niebuhr  that  is 
noteworthy. 

The  influence  of  Hare  was  potent  with  the  little 

1 '  Memorials  of  a  Quiet  Life, '  Vol.  I,  p.  458. 


68  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

group  of  friends  who  surrounded  Tennyson.  The  stu- 
dents who  were  under  his  sway  frequently  did  more 
than  imbibe  his  views ;  they  carried  them  further,  and 
sometimes  carried  them  into  action.  Byron  for  more 
than  a  dozen  years  had  dominated  the  realm  of  poetry. 
To  him  all  aspirants  for  fame  had  bent  the  knee.  The 
supremacy  of  this  autocrat  these  revolutionists  now 
proceeded  to  assail.  Hare  in  particular  had  early 
become  one  of  the  most  thoroughgoing  advocates  of 
Wordsworth.  He  had  upheld  his  supremacy  at  a  time 
when  many  were  disposed  to  deny  him  poetical  merit 
at  all.  Along  with  his  passionate  admiration  of  the 
poet  was  mingled  an  unqualified  contempt  for  the  intel- 
lectual qualities  of  those  who  had  of  him  an  opinion 
different  from  his  own.  It  sometimes  manifested 
itself  characteristically.  In  November,  1829,  a  debate 
took  place  at  the  Cambridge  Union  on  the  comparative 
merits  of  Byron  and  Wordsworth.  The  friends  of  the 
latter  poet  were  largely  outnumbered.  There  were  but 
twenty-three  votes  in  his  favor.  This  number  Hare 
declared  to  be  altogether  too  large.  There  were  not, 
he  said,  twenty-three  persons  in  the  room  who  were 
worthy  to  be  Wordsworthians. 

It  was  into  a  society  of  this  sort,  stirred  by  the  re- 
volt then  going  on  in  literature  and  life,  that  the 
Tennysons  were  thrown.  They  were  warmly  wel- 
comed. Little  as  the  volume  of  'Poems  by  Two 
Brothers'  had  been  read  or  circulated,  its  existence 
could  not  have  been  unknown  to  the  small  circle  of 
which  they  had  become  members.  Their  reputation 
had  preceded  them.     In  that  boyish  world  it  could 


UNIVERSITY  LIFE  69 

hardly  fail  to  give  a  certain  dignity  to  the  newcomers 
that  they  could  look  back  already  upon  a  past  of 
authorship.  From  incontestable  evidence  we  know 
that  in  these  college  days  poetical  fame  was  predicted 
for  both  the  brothers,  though  even  then  the  superior- 
ity was  generally  accorded  to  the  younger.  Charles 
Merivale's  father  had  been  a  friend  of  George  Clay- 
ton Tennyson  in  their  owti  university  days.  In  Octo- 
ber, 1826,  he  wrote  to  his  son,  advising  him  to  seek 
the  acquaintance  of  the  son  of  his  old  fellow  student.^ 
The  person  meant  was  Frederick.  But  in  April,  1828, 
about  three  months  after  the  arrival  of  the  other 
brothers,  Merivale  wrote  to  his  father  about  meeting 
not  the  one  who  had  been  recommended  to  him,  but  the 
younger  of  the  two  new  arrivals.  ''I  have  got,"  he 
said,  "the  third  of  the  Tennysons  in  my  room,  who  is 
an  immense  poet,  as  indeed  are  all  the  tribe — was  the 
father  so?"^  This  is  but  one  of  many  indications  of 
the  opinion  entertained  in  the  university  as  to  the 
respective  merits  of  the  three  and  of  the  superiority 
generally  accorded  to  Alfred.  He  was  the  only  one 
of  them  selected  to  become  a  member  of  a  distinctly 
exclusive  society,  which  both  then  and  later  played  an 
important,  though  in  some  ways  a  designedly  incon- 
spicuous part  in  the  intellectual  life  of  Cambridge 
University.  As  indirectly  it  had  a  good  deal  to  do 
with  the  growth  of  Tennyson's  reputation,  some 
account  of  it  is  desirable. 

1  '  Autobiography   and   Letters  of   Charles   Merivale,   Dean   of  Ely, ' 
Oxford,  1898,  p.  130. 

2  Ibid.,  p.  136. 


70  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

The  title  of  the  organization  was  the  Conversazione 
Society.  By  that  it  was  officially  known.  But  as  its 
number  was  ordinarily  limited  to  twelve,  the  term 
Apostles  was  given  to  it  in  derision.  As  is  not  unusual 
in  such  cases,  the  nickname  was  accepted,  by  those  to 
whom  it  was  applied,  as  a  title  of  honor.  Were  they 
not  commissioned  to  preach  to  the  sons  of  men  dwell- 
ing in  outer  darkness  new  truths  in  regard  to  literature 
and  religion,  the  cultivation  of  a  loftier  philosophy,  a 
purer  poetry,  higher  ideals  in  life  and  letters?  The 
society  was  made  up  of  undergraduates  or  of  those 
who,  having  taken  the  degree  of  bachelor  of  arts,  were 
still  continuing  to  pursue  their  studies  at  the  univer- 
sity. They  were  consequently  young  men  who  were 
brought  together  by  common  sympathies,  common 
tastes,  common  aspirations.  Their  minds  were  bub- 
bling over  mth  the  new  ideas  with  which  the  age  was 
fermenting.  They  were  disposed  to  scrutinize  with 
severity,  or  rather  to  treat  mth  contempt,  the  views 
generally  held  by  the  large  majority  of  men,  even  of 
educated  men,  in  regard  to  books  and  authors.  All  the 
fine  audacities  of  youth  in  speculation,  all  its  intense 
partisanship  in  matters  of  literature  were  repre- 
sented by  members  of  this  organization  who  had  the 
most  abiding  confidence  in  the  correctness  of  their 
opinions  on  any  subject  or  on  all  subjects.  ' '  The  world 
is  one  great  thought,  and  I  am  thinking  it"  was  the 
way  in  which  one  of  their  number — John  Mitchell 
Kemble — indicated  their  state  of  mind.^  Joined  with 
this  was  a  lofty  scorn  of  the  intellectual  capacities  of 

1 '  Autobiography  and  Letters  of  Charles  Merivale, '  p.  99, 


UNIVERSITY  LIFE  71 

those  who  did  not  share  in  their  opinions  and  beliefs. 
The  term  Philistine  had  not  yet  been  imported  from 
Germany  to  designate  the  members  of  the  shop- 
keeping  class  who  cared  nothing  for  high  ideals  in  life 
or  literature.  Still  less  had  the  word  come  to  be  per- 
verted to  stigmatize  those  whose  views  chanced  to 
differ  from  one's  own.  But  though  the  designation 
was  absent,  the  spirit  which  had  generated  it  was 
present  and  active.  For  the  characterization  of  the 
degraded  beings  who  had  not  attained  their  o\^^l  lofty 
level,  they  borrowed  another  vQ^d  from  the  German. 
They  designated  them  as  Stnmpfs — that  is,  ''stupids." 
Along  with  this  poor  opinion  of  the  men  of  their 
own  university  who  did  not  sympathize  with  their 
views  was  an  even  more  contemptuous  estimate  of  all 
who  had,  in  their  opinion,  the  misfortune  to  belong  to 
the  sister  university.  For  them  they  professed  un- 
measured contempt.  This  feeling  seems  to  have  been 
pretty  general  in  the  Apostolic  band.  They  based 
their  justification  for  this  state  of  mind  upon  the  long 
line  of  illustrious  men  of  which  Cambridge  had  been 
the  mother,  though  not  always  regarded  by  these  sons 
as  the  cherishing  mother ;  and  the  comparative  barren- 
ness in  this  particular  of  Oxford.  Especially  was  this 
true  of  those  w^ho  had  attained  distinction  in  verse. 
Chaucer,  Shakespeare,  and  Pope  had  received  no  uni- 
versity training;  but  of  the  other  poets  of  the  first 
class  Spenser,  Milton,  Dryden,  Gray,  Coleridge, 
Wordsworth,  and  Byron  were  all  graduates  of  Cam- 
bridge. Besides  these,  there  too  had  been  educated  no 
small  number  of  authors  of  inferior  grade,  such,  for 


72  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

instance,  as  Herrick,  Herbert,  Waller,  Suckling, 
Crashaw,  and  Cowley.  In  consequence  of  this  pre- 
ponderance of  eminent  writers  a  sense  of  intellectual 
superiority  came  to  prevail  in  those  days  and  more 
than  once  made  amusing  exhibition  of  itself.  It  lasted 
indeed  in  members  of  the  Apostolic  band  and  their 
associates  long  after  the  period  had  arrived  for  out- 
growing this  particular  form  of  folly.  In  December, 
1840,  Brookfield  wrote  to  his  wife  about  one  of  the 
undergraduates  of  the  sister  institution.  ''I  found 
him  very  oxford,"  he  said, — "which  I  can't  for  the 
life  of  me  help  spelling  with  a  little  o — and  indeed  I 
utterly  despair  of  ever  seeing  a  half-penny  worth  of 
vigorous  and  apprehensive  mind  from  that  precious 
school  of  gentility,  and  I  never  speak  to  one  of  her 
graceful  children  without  thinking  of  Venables'  .  .  .. 
modest  remark — *  I  often  wonder  what  we  have  done  to 
deserve  being  gifted  as  we  are  so  much  above  those 
cursed  idiotic  oxford  brutes.'  "^  In  a  later  letter  he 
commented  on  the  unconscious  good  faith  with  which 
Venables  had  given  utterance  to  this  opinion.  "His 
mind,"  he  said,  "not  in  the  least  engaged  with  the 
fact  of  Cambridge  superiority — which  was  far  too 
matter-of-course  a  thing  to  dwell  upon — but  solely  "with 
speculation  upon  the  cause  ...  I  believe  that  Oxford 
minds  are  not  considered  to  have  any  value  but  such 
as  arises  (as  in  Turnspit  dogs)  from  their  extreme 
rarity. ' ' 

Such  was  the  sort  of  spirit  that  prevailed  among  the 
members  of  this  so-called  Apostolic  band.    The  birth- 

1  'Mrs.  Brookfield  and  her  Circle,'  Vol.  I,  pp.  59-60. 


UNIVERSITY  LIFE  73 

place  of  the  organization  had  been  St.  John's  College. 
Thriving  after  a  fashion  for  a  while  in  its  original 
home,  it  gra-vdtated  at  length  to  Trinity,  where  it 
began  an  altogether  new  life.  Frederick  Denison 
Maurice,  who  had  entered  that  college  in  1823,  is 
credited  with  being  its  second  founder.  **The  effect," 
wrote  Arthur  Hallam  to  Gladstone  in  1830,  ''which 
he" — that  is,  Maurice — "has  produced  on  the  minds 
of  many  at  Cambridge  by  the  single  creation  of  that 
Society  of  the  Apostles  (for  the  spirit,  though  not  the 
form,  w^as  created  by  him)  is  far  greater  than  I  can 
dare  to  calculate,  and  will  be  felt,  both  directly  and 
indirectly,  in  the  age  that  is  upon  us."^  It  is  mani- 
fest from  this  and  various  similar  expressions  by 
others  that  the  members  of  the  organization  had  no 
poor  opinion  of  themselves.  It  was  their  intention  and 
expectation  to  uplift  and  regenerate  society.  Their 
mission,  said  one  of  their  number,  was  to  enlighten 
mankind  upon  things  spiritual  and  intellectual.  They 
possessed,  too,  in  its  fulness,  that  preliminary  to  all 
success  in  shaking  the  world,  an  absolute  confidence 
in  their  ability  to  shake  it.  Necessarily  they  had  a  set 
of  idols  to  whom  they  bowed  down  reverentially.  Cole- 
ridge was  their  principal  divinity  in  metaphysics, 
Wordsworth  in  poetry.  The  reign  of  the  latter  was 
not  wholly  absolute.  In  it  Shelley  and  Keats  were 
coming  to  have  a  recognized  position.  It  was  by  the 
men  of  this  little  band  that  the  'Adonais,'  the  monody 
of  the  former  on  the  death  of  the  latter,  printed  at 
Pisa  in  1821,  w^as  first  reprinted  in  England  in  1829. 

I'Life  of  Frederick  Denison  Maurice,'  Vol.  I,  p.  110. 


74  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

About  this  society  hung  all  that  air  of  mystery 
which  constitutes  a  peculiar  charm  of  itself  to  those 
who  are  in  the  period  of  intellectual  immaturity. 
Reticence  in  regard  to  it  was  carried  to  the  extremest 
extreme.  It  cared  not  to  flaunt  itself  in  the  light  of 
day.  It  exhibited  no  visible  symbols  of  its  possession 
of  a  being.  It  sought  secrecy,  at  that  time  at  least,  not 
to  inspire  curiosity  or  interest,  but  for  the  sake  of 
secrecy  itself.  Its  very  existence  was  a  matter  of 
deduction ;  it  could  not  be  said  to  be  positively  known. 
So  far  were  its  members  from  being  desirous  of  prid- 
ing themselves  upon  their  connection  with  it,  they 
labored  to  conceal  the  fact  that  they  belonged  to  it. 
Your  most  intimate  friend  might  be  one  of  the  sacred 
band ;  but  you  did  not  know  it,  you  merely  inferred  it. 
You  observed  that  he  was  familiar  with  celebrities  no 
longer  in  residence  and  no  longer  having  any  direct 
relations  to  the  university.  You  saw  that  on  Saturday 
evenings  he  was  always  engaged  somewhere,  though 
you  had  no  means  of  ascertaining  where.  The  silence 
which  guarded  the  existence  of  the  organization  was 
never  broken  by  him  in  the  days  of  his  active  member- 
ship. 

To  this  society  Arthur  Hallam  and  Tennyson  were 
elected  on  January  24,  1830.  The  conviction  of 
Alfred's  superiority  to  his  two  brothers  is  evinced  by 
this  choice  of  him  as  one  of  the  Apostles.  He  seems 
to  have  been  hardly  a  faithful  member.  In  the  account 
of  this  organization  given  by  Leslie  Stephen  he  repre- 
sents that  according  to  his  brother's  report — which 
may  have  come  down  by  tradition — Tennyson  ''had  to 


UNIVERSITY  LIFE  75 

leave  the  Society  because  he  was  too  lazy  to  write  an 
essay.  "^  "Whatever  may  be  the  truth  as  to  the  reason 
assigned,  there  seems  little  doubt  that  he  failed  to 
respond,  when  it  became  his  duty  to  produce  one  at  the 
appointed  time.  It  was  not  likely,  however,  to  have 
been  from  laziness.  The  failure  was  in  all  probabiUty 
due  to  his  constitutional  shyness  or  to  dissatisfaction 
with  what  he  had  prepared.  Whatever  was  the  real 
reason  for  cutting  short,  if  the  tradition  be  true,  his 
direct  connection  vdih  the  society,  his  hold  upon  its 
members  was  not  in  the  least  degree  impaired  either 
at  the  time  or  afterward.  He  received  indeed  from  his 
associates  then  in  the  organization  and  from  their 
successors  what  came  to  be  powerful  support  in  the 
most  trying  days  of  his  career. 

There  can  indeed  be  no  doubt  as  to  the  profound 
personal  impression  made  by  Tennyson  upon  the  bril- 
liant group  of  his  college  contemporaries.  The  evi- 
dence to  this  effect  is  abundant  in  quantity  and  pro- 
nounced in  its  positiveness.  Long  before  he  had 
accomplished  an}i;hing  which  could  with  propriety  be 
termed  great,  he  was  so  considered  and  so  styled  by 
no  small  number  of  the  circle  to  which  he  belonged. 
Whether  the  prophecy  of  his  future  fame  was  due  to 
a  far-sighted  prescience  begot  of  the  deep  insight 
which  springs  from  intimate  personal  acquaintance,  or 
whether  it  was  merely  the  enthusiastic  devotion  of 
friendship  which  was  for  once  justified  in  its  faith  by 
the  conformity  of  later  fact,  certain  it  is  that  the  belief 

I'The  Life  of  Sir  James  Fitzjamea  Stephen,'  by  his  brother  Leslie 
Stephen,  1895,  p.  100. 


76  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

that  he  was  to  be  one  of  the  leading  poets  of  the  cen- 
tury, if  not  its  leading  poet,  was  not  only  firmly  held 
at  Cambridge  University  but  was  loudly  proclaimed, 
much  to  the  wrath,  as  will  be  seen  later,  of  professional 
critics  who  resented  any  attempt  to  force  upon  their 
approval  reputations  which  had  not  received  from 
themselves  their  first  certificate  of  merit. 

Illustrations  of  this  conviction  of  Tennyson's  great- 
ness abound  during  the  whole  of  his  university  career. 
Especially  was  this  true  after  the  publication  of  his 
first  volume  of  verse,  while  he  was  still  an  undergrad- 
uate. "My  brother  John,"  wrote  Fanny  Kemble  in 
the  recollections  of  her  girlhood,  "gave  me  the  first 
copy  of  his  poems  I  ever  possessed."^  It  was  accom- 
panied with  a  prophecy  of  his  future  fame  and  excel- 
lence written  on  the  flyleaf.  The  brother  did  not  con- 
fine his  predictions  to  his  sister.  On  April  1,  1830,  he 
wrote  to  Trench  about  both  Charles  and  Alfred.  He 
declared  them  to  be  "of  the  highest  class."  "In 
Alfred's  mind,"  he  continued,  "the  materials  of  the 
very  greatest  works  are  heaped  in  an  abundance  which 
is  almost  confusion.  Charles  has  just  published  a 
volume  of  superb  sonnets ;  and  his  brother  and  Hallam 
are  about  to  edit  their  poems  conjointly.  One  day  these 
men  will  be  great  indeed.'"  Similarly  in  January  of 
this  year  Blakesley,  who  died  as  dean  of  Lincoln,  wrote 
from  Cambridge  to  the  same  man  of  the  accession  of 
Hallam  and  Tennyson  to  the  ranks  of  the  Apostles. 
'  *  The  Society, ' '  he  said, '  *  has  received  a  great  addition 

1 'Records  of  a  Girlhood,'  1879,  p.  184. 

2 'Letters  and  Memorials  of  Archbishop  Trench,'  1888,  Vol.  I,  p.  59. 


UNIVERSITY  LIFE  77 

in  Hallam  and  in  Alfred  Tennyson,  the  author  of  the 
last  prize  poem,  'Timbuctoo'  (of  which  Landor,  whom 
I  dare  say,  you  will  see  at  Rome,  will  give  you  an 
account) — truly  one  of  the  mighty  of  the  earth.  You 
will  be  delighted  with  him  when  you  see  him."^ 

This  early  extravagant  advocacy  of  Tennyson's 
claims,  and  the  early  proclamation  of  his  greatness 
by  his  friends  were  attended  by  a  result  which  could 
have  been  predicted  beforehand.  The  enthusiasm  dis- 
played by  them  in  his  behalf,  if  it  did  not  actually  re- 
tard the  growth  of  his  reputation,  certainly  did  not 
advance  it.  Their  ardent  and  undiscriminating  eulogy 
provoked  disparaging  and  contemptuous  criticism. 
However  painful  this  may  have  been  at  the  time  to  the 
subject  of  it,  it  is  not  improbable  that  it  contributed 
more  to  the  development  of  his  powers  and  to  the 
chastening  of  his  style  than  the  atmosphere  of  unmixed 
laudation  in  which  his  first  efforts  made  their  appear- 
ance in  the  circle  of  which  he  formed  a  part. 

But  in  that  college  circle  everything  was  at  that  time 
favorable.  While  still  a  student  at  the  university  he 
produced  the  piece  to  which  reference  was  made  by 
Blakesley.  On  Saturday,  June  6,  1829,  the  Chancel- 
lor's gold  medal  for  the  best  English  poem  by  a  resi- 
dent undergraduate  w^as  adjudged  to  Alfred  Tenny- 
son. He  had  not  been  a  willing  contestant  for  the 
prize  he  secured.  It  was  at  his  father's  ^^'ish  that  he 
competed.  The  subject  given  was  Timbuctoo.  Accord- 
ingly he  furbished  up  an  old  poem  entitled  'The  Battle 
of  Armageddon,'  to  do  duty  in  celebrating  a  city  of 

1  Ibid.,  p.  50. 


78  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

which  he  and  every  one  else  knew  nothing — a  city 
accordingly  which  imagination  could  endow  with 
stately  palaces,  fair  gardens,  argent  streets,  pagodas, 
obelisks,  minarets,  and  towers,  even  though  reason 
whispered  that  these  visionary  objects  would  in  reality 
shrink  into  a  settlement  of  huts  low-built  and  mud- 
walled.  The  poem  itself  consisted  of  about  two  hun- 
dred and  fifty  lines.  The  distinguishing  peculiarity 
of  it  was  that  it  was  written  in  blank  verse;  for  the 
revolutionary  spirit  that  was  then  in  the  air  extended 
even  to  poetical  composition.  Hallam's  competing 
production,  too,  was  in  terza  rima.  Both  the  measures 
chosen  outraged  all  academical  tradition;  for  from 
the  beginning  the  rh>Tned  heroic  verse  had  been  conse- 
crated to  prize  poetry.  Of  the  unsuccessful  contest- 
ants we  know  the  names  of  Arthur  Henry  Hallam,  of 
Richard  Monckton  Milnes,  and  of  George  Stovin  Ven- 
ables.  Doubtless  there  were  several  others.  The  piece 
itself  was  printed  the  same  year  in  the  'Prolusiones 
AcademicaB. '  It  was  later  reprinted  several  times, 
though  not  until  a  comparatively  recent  period  has  it 
been  included  in  the  editions  of  the  poet's  works. 

No  satisfactory  reason  has  ever  yet  been  furnished 
for  the  subjects  chosen  for  prize  poems.  These  are 
usually  as  wonderful  as  the  verse  to  which  they  give 
birth.  We  have  seen  that  the  one  named  for  1829  was 
Timbuctoo.  To  most  men  the  selection  will  now 
appear  absolutely  incomprehensible.  Wliy  of  all  the 
places  in  the  world  this  city  on  the  southern  verge  of 
the  Sahara  Desert  with  its  affluence  of  mud  houses  and 
its  penury  of  palaces  should  have  been  picked  out  as 


UNIVERSITY  LIFE  79 

the  subject  of  a  prize  poem  will  be  explained  by  them 
as  due  to  that  inscrutable  providence  which  seems  to 
have  designed  that  the  character  of  the  topics  to  be 
treated  in  this  sort  of  literature  should  be  adapted  to 
the  character  of  the  literature  itself. 

At  the  same  time  there  were  then  some  special  rea- 
sons which  were  of  weight  in  dictating  the  choice. 
Attention  had  for  many  years  been  directed  to  that 
portion  of  the  dark  continent  in  which  lay  this  city. 
To  the  civilized  world  it  was  known  only  by  report. 
There  was  something  of  the  same  desire  to  reach  it 
as  there  has  been  to  see  Mecca;  but  it  was  at  that 
particular  time  much  more  intense  and  widespread. 
Interest,  too,  had  long  been  aroused  in  the  equally 
mysterious  river  near  which  it  stood.  To  find  either 
the  source  or  mouth  of  the  Niger  and  to  trace  its  course 
had  been  before  the  period  under  consideration,  and 
long  after  continued  to  be,  one  of  the  baffling  problems 
of  African  exploration.  But  during  the  decade  from 
1820  to  1830  special  interest  had  been  awakened  in  the 
city  itself.  It  had  flourished  for  centuries,  it  had  been 
the  seat  of  successive  kingdoms  and  the  prize  of  con- 
tending nations;  yet  it  was  now  hid  in  an  obscurity 
which  no  efforts  seemed  able  to  dissipate.  Neither  its 
character  nor  its  extent  was  known,  not  even  its  pre- 
cise situation.  Vague  dreams  of  its  magnificence 
floated  in  the  imaginations  of  some,  with  pretty  con- 
fident belief  in  its  meanness  on  the  part  of  others. 
Everything  was  possibly  existent  in  a  place  which  no 
European  eyes  had  ever  beheld.  Mungo  Park  had 
passed  by  its  port  in  1805.    In  1826  Major  Laing  had 


80  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

reached  it  and  sojourned  in  it  for  some  weeks;  but 
on  his  return  he  fell  a  victim  to  the  jealousy  which  had 
long  guarded  the  secret  of  the  city's  situation  and 
character.  Perishing  in  the  desert  his  papers  never 
saw  the  light.  In  1828  the  Frenchman,  Rene  Caillie, 
visited  it  and  remained  in  it  fourteen  days.  So  at  least 
he  said,  though  his  account,  now  admitted  to  be  true, 
was  at  the  time  received  with  suspicion,  if  not  with 
positive  incredulity.  Naturally,  therefore,  about  the 
city  itself  still  remained  an  atmosphere  of  mystery  and 
of  consequent  curiosity.  That  is  pretty  clearly  the 
reason  why  Timbuctoo  was  selected  as  the  subject. 

When  Pendennis  asks  Warrington,  who  had  told 
him  he  was  a  poet,  whether  it  was  his  *  Ariadne  in 
Naxos'  or  his  Prize  Poem  on  which  he  based  his  fav- 
orable opinion,  that  kindly  but  rough  critic  is  repre- 
sented as  yelling  out  to  his  inquiring  friend  this  genial 
outburst:  ''Of  all  the  miserable,  weak  rubbish  I  ever 
tried,  'Ariadne  in  Naxos'  is  the  most  mawkish  and 
disgusting."  "The  Prize  Poem,"  he  continued,  "is 
so  pompous  and  feeble  that  I'm  positively  surprised, 
sir,  it  didn't  get  the  medal."  This  somewhat  pro- 
nounced criticism  is  unfortunately  sustained  by  the 
character  of  many  and  perhaps  most  of  the  poems 
which  have  attained  this  distinction.  Still,  several  of 
them  have  been  the  work  of  men  who  subsequently 
acquired  more  or  less  poetic  reputation — such  as 
Heber,  Bulwer,  Milman,  Macaulay,  Praed,  and  Mat- 
thew Arnold.  Yet  the  common  view  is  justified  by  the 
literary  quality  of  these  pieces.  As  a  general  rule 
there  is  only  one  sort  of  poem  which  is  fuller  of  sus- 


UNIVERSITY  LIFE  81 

tained  and  imposing  tediousness  than  a  prize  poem: 
and  that  is  a  competing  poem  which  has  not  taken  the 
prize.  Nor  can  it  well  be  maintained,  as  it  seems  to 
me,  that  the  'Timbuctoo'  of  Tennyson  varies  mate- 
rially from  the  estimate  implied  in  the  words  which 
Thackeray  puts  in  the  mouth  of  Warrington.  Indeed, 
Tennyson's  own  opinion  seems  not  to  have  differed 
from  this.  Sometime  during  the  decade  from  1830 
to  1840 — his  son  is  inclined  to  put  it  as  perhaps  about 
1831 — a  letter  was  sent  the  poet  by  a  printer  who 
asked  leave  to  include  'Timbuctoo'  in  a  collection  of 
prize  poems.  Tennyson  gave  to  the  application  a 
somewhat  reluctant  assent.  He  took  care  at  the  same 
time  to  indicate  his  opinion  of  works  of  this  nature. 
''Prize  poems,"  he  wrote,  "(without  any  exception 
even  in  favour  of  Mr.  Mihnan's  'Belvidere')  are  not 
properly  speaking  'Poems'  at  all,  and  ought  to  be  for- 
gotten as  soon  as  recited.  I  could  have  wished  that 
poor  'Timbuctoo'  might  have  been  suffered  to  slide 
quietly  off,  \vith  all  its  errors,  into  forgetfulness." 

Nor  was  this  merely  the  feeling  of  the  moment. 
About  the  middle  of  the  century  he  expressed  the  same 
sentiment  to  a  subsequent  gainer  of  the  prize  who 
had  also  written  his  poem  in  blank  verse.  "I  could 
wish  that  it  had  never  been  written,"  he  said  of  his 
own  production.^  Still  whatever  may  have  been  the 
poet 's  own  estimate  of  his  work,  there  is  no  doubt  as  to 
the  opinion  entertained  of  it  in  the  little  circle  to 
which  he  belonged.  The  enthusiasm  of  his  admirers 
found  at  once  vociferous  vent.    'Timbuctoo'  was  hailed 

iF.  W.  Farrar's  'Men  I  have  Known,'  1897,  p.  20. 


82  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

as  a  masterpiece  of  genius.  On  the  strength  of  the 
excellence  displayed  in  it,  prophetic  anticipations  of 
the  future  greatness  of  its  author  were  loudly  pro- 
claimed. There  was  little  hesitation,  little  restraint 
in  the  language  of  the  band  of  admirers  who  sur- 
rounded the  young  poet.  Two  of  the  competitors  for 
the  prize  expressed  their  admiration  in  extravagant 
terms.  In  a  letter  dated  September  14,  1829,  Hallam 
wrote  about  'Timbuctoo'  to  his  friend  Gladstone,  then 
a  student  at  Oxford.  In  this  he  gave  utterance  to  the 
following  bit  of  prophecy  inspired  by  the  poem.  ' '  The 
splendid  imaginative  power  that  pervades  it,"  he 
wrote,  'Svill  be  seen  through  all  hindrances.  I  con- 
sider Tennyson  as  promising  fair  to  be  the  greatest 
poet  of  our  generation,  perhaps  of  our  century."^  A 
little  later  Milnes  bore  similar  testimony.  ''Tenny- 
son's poem  has  made  quite  a  sensation,"  he  wrote  to 
his  father  in  the  latter  part  of  October.  "It  is  cer- 
tainly equal  to  most  parts  of  Milton." 

These  extravagant  words  express,  to  be  sure,  the 
opinion  of  boys  still  under  age,  and  of  boys  further- 
more who  had  been  unsuccessful  competitors  for  the 
prize;  and  if  one  is  beaten  in  a  poetical  contest,  it  is 
certainly  more  creditable  to  be  beaten  by  the  equal  of 
Milton  or  by  the  greatest  poet  of  the  century  than  by 
some  one  destined  to  be  a  nameless  nonentity.  Yet 
almost  as  high  praise  came  from  another  and  entirely 
disinterested  quarter.  Charles  Wordsworth,  the  fu- 
ture bishop  of  St.  Andrews,  was  an  Oxford  man. 
There  is  no  ground  for  supposing  him  to  have  had  a 

1  '  Memoir, '  Vol.  I,  p.  46. 


UNIVERSITY  LIFE  83 

personal  acquaintance  with  Tennyson.  Yet  he  thought 
'Timbuctoo'  ''a  wonderful  production,"  though  he 
admitted  that  if  such  a  piece  had  been  sent  up  at 
Oxford,  its  author,  instead  of  receiving  the  prize, 
would  have  been  more  likely  to  have  been  rusticated 
with  the  view  of  his  passing  a  few  months  at  a  lunatic 
asylum.  Still,  he  added,  ''if  it  had  come  out  with 
Lord  Byron's  name,  it  would  have  been  thought  as 
fine  as  anything  he  ever  wrote. ' '  This  was  as  ridicu- 
lous a  remark  as  anything  that  Tennyson's  Cambridge 
friends  had  said.  It  is,  however,  fair  to  take  into 
account  that  the  production  of  a  poem  as  fine  as  any- 
thing Byron  ever  wrote  would  not  have  been  deemed 
by  the  utterer  extravagant  praise,  if  it  came  from  a 
member  of  the  Wordsworth  family. 

Such  opinions,  absurd  as  they  now  strike  us,  re- 
flected with  some  accuracy  the  prevalent  sentiment 
of  the  coterie  which  had  gathered  about  the  young 
poet.  It  found  indeed  published  expression  in  a 
critical  periodical  which  was  then  in  the  beginning  of 
a  long  and  yet  unended  career.  Early  in  January, 
1828,  '  The  Athenaeum '  had  been  set  on  foot  by  James 
Silk  Buckingham,  an  inveterate  founder  of  periodicals. 
For  the  first  few  years  after  its  creation,  it  maintained 
a  somewhat  precarious  existence.  It  early  passed  into 
the  hands  of  Frederick  Denison  Maurice.  He  in  1829 
resigned  the  editorship  to  John  Sterling,  though  he 
continued  to  contribute  to  its  columns.  Both  these 
graduates  of  the  university  were  connected  by  the 
closest  ties  with  the  younger  body  of  men  who  made 
up  the  Cambridge  set  to  which  Tennyson  belonged.    In 


84  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

August,  1828,  Trench  wrote  to  Kemble  that  Maurice 
and  ''that  gallant  band  of  Platonico-Wordsworthian- 
Coleridgean-anti-Utilitarians"  were  at  the  helm  of 
'The  Athenaeum'  with  undivided  sway.  In  the  follow- 
ing month  he  informed  the  same  correspondent  that 
this  periodical  was  written  entirely  by  Apostles. 

Naturally  no  hostile  criticism  would  come  from  such 
a  quarter.  But  what  was  hardly  to  be  expected,  highly 
favorable  criticism  came  instead.  It  is  something 
unusual  for  prize  poems  to  receive  the  notice  of 
reviewers.  It  was  the  connection  of  the  then  editors 
of  'The  Athenaeum'  with  the  members  of  the  Apos- 
tolic band  that  led  to  the  exception  which  was  made 
in  this  particular  case.  In  July,  1829,  appeared  in 
that  periodical  a  highly  eulogistic  notice  of  'Timbuc- 
too.'  Included  in  the  article  was  an  extract  from  the 
poem  itself  to  the  extent  of  fifty  lines.  "We  have 
accustomed  ourselves,"  said  the  critic,  "to  think, 
perhaps  without  any  good  reason,  that  poetry  was 
likely  to  perish  among  us  for  a  considerable  period, 
after  the  great  generation  of  poets  which  is  now  pass- 
ing away.  The  age  seems  determined  to  contradict  us, 
and  that  in  the  most  decided  manner:  for  it  has  put 
forth  poetry  by  a  young  man,  and  that  where  we 
should  least  expect  it — namely,  in  a  prize  poem. 
These  productions  have  often  been  ingenious  and  ele- 
gant, but  we  have  never  before  seen  one  of  them  which 
indicates  really  first-rate  poetical  genius,  and  which 
would  have  done  honor  to  any  man  that  ever  wrote. 
Such,  we  do  not  hesitate  to  affirm,  is  the  little  work  be- 
fore us;  and  the  examiners  seem  to  have  felt  it  like 


UNIVERSITY  LIFE  85 

ourselves,  for  they  have  assigned  the  prize  to  its 
author,  tho'  the  measure  in  which  he  writes  has  never 
before,  we  believe,  been  thus  selected  for  honor." 
Then,  after  quoting  the  passage  from  lines  62  to  112 
the  reviewer  solemnly  added:  ''How  many  men  who 
have  lived  for  a  century  could  equal  this  ? ' ' 

Of  course  it  is  idle  to  pretend  that  this  is  an  out" 
side  impartial  estimate  of  the  production.  It  is 
equally  idle  to  celebrate  its  courage  and  foresight, 
now  that  later  achievement  has  shown  that  this  partic- 
ular poet  has  realized  the  anticipations  of  his  early 
admirers.  For  'Timbuctoo'  was  in  no  sense  whatever 
a  great  poem.  There  are  fine  lines  in  it  and  even  fine 
passages.  Still,  none  of  them  belong  to  poetry  of  the 
highest  order.  Had  not  Tennyson  written  many 
things  far  better,  his  name  would  scarcely  be  heard 
of  now,  if  heard  of  at  all.  It  was  not  his  fault  that 
what  appeared  in  the  poem  could  hardly  be  said  to 
have  the  slightest  connection  with  the  place  which  did 
duty  for  its  title.  Nobody  knew  anything  about  Tim- 
buctoo.  Accordingly  it  was  excusable  for  the  poet  not 
to  say  anything  about  it,  though  he  was  careful  to 
drag  in  its  name.  It  was  consequently  inevitable  that 
there  should  be  in  it  an  indefiniteness  which  verged 
closely  upon  the  incomprehensible.  In  fact,  this  was 
the  view  taken  at  the  time  in  Cambridge  itself.  Even 
the  enthusiastic  Hallam,  who  saw  in  the  production  the 
promise  of  the  greatest  poet  of  the  century,  declared 
that  the  examiners  by  striking  out  the  prose  argu- 
ment, which  the  author  had  prefixed  to  the  piece,  had 
done  all  in  their  power  to  verify  the  concluding  words, 


86  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

*'A11  was  dark,"  which  he  quoted,  however,  as  ''All 
was  night." 

Naturally  a  poem  which  depended  for  its  comprehen- 
sibility  upon  a  prose  argument  prefixed,  cannot  strictly 
be  deemed  entitled  to  the  praise  of  clearness.  In 
truth,  several  years  after — in  1836 — appeared  in  the 
then  rowdy,  rollicking  monthly,  'Fraser's  Magazine,' 
an  article  in  the  shape  of  a  letter  from  Cambridge,  pur- 
porting to  give  the  philosophy  of  the  art  of  plucking. 
It  was  followed  by  another  article  in  the  number  for 
July  which  pretended  to  give  pluck  examination 
papers.^  In  the  first  of  the  two  the  Chancellor's  medal 
was  disrespectfully  designated  as  the  annual  medal  for 
the  discouragement  of  English  poetry.  In  the  second 
there  was  a  series  of  questions  in  a  critical  examina- 
tion paper.  One  was  to  this  effect:  "What  is  Pro- 
fessor Smythe's  opinion  of  the  Nebulous  and  Incom- 
prehensible in  Poetry!  Illustrate  your  explanation  by 
extracts  from  Tennyson's  Timhuctoo." 

In  truth,  'Timbuctoo,'  after  Tennyson  had  founded 
a  school  of  his  own,  might  have  been  produced  by  a 
score  of  his  best  imitators  without  exciting  any  par- 
ticular remark.  It  would  certainly  in  such  a  case  have 
had  no  result  of  producing  a  prediction  that  a  new 
great  poet  had  arisen.  Still,  it  is  easy  now  to  under- 
rate the  piece  as  it  was  then  to  exalt  it.  There  was  a 
certain  just  foundation  for  the  admiration  that  was 
felt  and  the  enthusiasm  that  was  displayed.  For 
'Timbuctoo'  was  a  poem  written  in  a  distinctly  new 
style.    It  was  no  echo  of  any  writer  that  had  preceded. 

iVol.  XIV,  p.  117. 


UNIVERSITY  LIFE  87 

That  it  was  produced  under  the  influence  of  several 
different  ones  has  been  pointed  out  by  the  critical  per- 
spicacity of  men  who  agree  on  the  fact  of  imitation 
though  not  on  the  person  imitated.  One  or  two  indeed 
have  been  selected  for  his  model  whom  at  that  time 
Tennyson  had  not  even  read.  It  is  not  an  uncommon 
thing  to  hear  it  said  that  in  this  poem  the  influence  of 
Shelley  is  plainly  discernible.  Were  anything  spe- 
cially due  to  that  author  it  would  be  the  vague  haze 
pervading  it,  which  at  times  renders  it  no  easy  matter 
to  make  out  the  writer's  drift,  through  the  mist  of 
words  in  which  it  is  enveloped.  Still,  Tennyson  was 
undoubtedly  capable  of  being  obscure  on  his  own 
account  and  did  not  need  to  resort  to  Shelley  for 
assistance  in  that  particular.  Necessarily  every  young 
writer  is  influenced  by  poets  of  the  past.  But  just  as 
in  his  boyish  lines  in  his  first  production  in  the  volume 
brought  out  in  conjunction  with  his  brother,  whatever 
of  those  which  were  distinctly  best  was  purely  his  own, 
so  it  was  in  '  Timbuctoo. '  A  new  and  original  poet  had 
come  who  was  to  introduce  into  our  literature  a  method 
of  expression  conspicuously  different  from  what  had 
gone  before.  His  admirers  recognized  it  and  felt  it 
from  the  first.  They  were  impressed  by  its  novelty, 
they  were  led  to  celebrate  it  unduly  before  its  fulness 
and  force  had  been  developed.  In  consequence,  they 
gave  it  the  credit  of  possessing  a  beauty  and  power 
which  was  indicated  but  not  yet  attained. 

This  fact  enables  us  to  understand  the  fervor  of 
praise  with  which  many  of  Tennyson's  early  pieces 
were  received  which  strike  us  now  as  being  possessed 


88  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

of  but  ordinary  merit.  It  was  a  new  force  in  litera- 
ture which  was  manifesting  itself.  The  men  who 
admired  it  welcomed  it  \vith  an  enthusiasm  which  they 
could  not  have  felt  later  when  it  had  become  familiar 
to  every  one.  On  the  contrary,  the  followers  of  the 
old  school  looked  upon  it  askance  or  displayed  abso- 
lute indifference.  They  either  refused  to  read  it  at 
all,  or  read  it  only  for  the  sake  of  vituperating  it. 
In  these  opposite  points  of  view  and  the  states  of 
mind  engendered  by  them  lay  the  tardy  recogTiition 
which  waited  upon  Tennyson's  first  efforts  and  the 
hold  he  acquired  and  retained  when  acceptance  of  his 
work  had  at  last  become  general.  The  change  of  atti- 
tude on  the  part  of  the  public  was  indicated  by  him 
later  in  the  poem  entitled  'The  Flower.'  Tennyson 
emphatically  denied  that  in  this  piece  he  had  made 
any  allusion  to  himself  personally  or  to  his  own  for- 
tunes. He  called  it  ''an  universal  apologue  and  para- 
ble." To  a  writer  who  had  sent  him  a  volume  of 
essays  he  remarked  that  "you  have  fallen  into  a  not 
uncommon  error  with  respect  to  my  little  fable  'The 
Flower',  as  if  'I'  in  the  poem  meant  A.  T.  and  'the 
flower'  my  own  verses." 

It  is  just  to  accept  this  disclaimer  by  Tennyson  of 
any  intended  allusion  to  his  own  personality.  It  was 
a  universal  truth  which  he  had  made  prominent  in  his 
apologue.  Still,  it  is  evident  a  natural,  perhaps  the 
natural  interpretation  of  the  lines,  was  that  it  was  a 
reference  to  his  own  fortunes.  This  little  piece 
appeared  originally  in  the  volume  entitled  'Enoch 
Arden,  etc.,'  which  came  out  in  1864.     For  nearly  a 


UNIVERSITY  LIFE  89 

score  of  years  Tennyson  had  been  recognized  as 
standing  at  the  head  of  li\'ing  English  poets.  A  crowd 
of  imitators  had  sprung  up  in  every  quarter.  They 
had  made  his  style  and  method  of  expression  familiar. 
The  ine\i.table  reaction  from  this  excessive  popularity 
had  already  begun  to  show  its  face,  though  it  was  not 
till  the  following  decade  that  it  ventured  to  display 
its  hostility  openly.  The  poet's  peculiarities  of  diction 
had  not  only  been  commented  upon,  but  they  had  been 
imitated  and  reproduced  until  the  queasy  taste  of  the 
public  was  beginning  to  show  manifest  signs  of  having 
become  weary  of  what  it  had  previously  cherished. 
The  seed  which  he  had  sown  had  produced  the  flower 
which  was  first  called  a  weed.  It  had  few  admirers 
and  many  vituperators.  Then  all  had  been  changed. 
Everybody  praised  the  flower.  Everybody  procured 
the  seed.  Soon  its  commonness  began  to  make  men 
tired  of  it  and  once  more  led  them  to  term  it  a  weed. 
For  the  seed  sown  in  unsatisfactory  soil  could  not  pro- 
duce the  perfect  flower;  but  it  could  produce  some- 
thing which  looked  like  it,  which  suggested  it,  which 
bore  to  it,  in  fact,  so  close  a  resemblance  that  it  tended 
to  impress  itself  as  the  genuine  article  upon  that  large 
number  whose  literary  perception  was  not  sufficiently 
keen  to  detect  the  presence  of  that  incommunicable 
something  that  not  merely  distinguishes  genius  from 
mediocrity  but  genius  from  poetic  talent  of  a  high 
order.  The  reader  was  reminded  of  Tennyson;  but 
because  of  the  lack  of  that  subtle  something  which 
cannot  well  be  described  or  defined,  he  did  not  feel  him 
as  a  force. 


90  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

One  episode  there  was  in  Tennyson's  career  at  the 
university  which  had  little  to  do  with  prize  poetry  or 
college  honors.  During  the  summer  of  1830  he  made 
with  Hallam  a  foot-journey  across  France  to  the 
Pyrenees.  The  trip  was  undertaken  in  behalf  of  the 
Spanish  revolutionists.  Readers  of  Carlyle's  'Life  of 
John  Sterling'  will  remember  the  account  given  in  it 
of  the  exiled  general  Torrijos,  and  the  tragic  fate 
which  overtook  him  and  his  little  band  of  followers 
when  he  set  out  upon  his  hopeless  expedition  into  the 
south  of  Spain.  Only  incidental  mention  is  made  of 
the  young  Englishmen  who  cast  in  their  lot  with  the 
conspirators.  Sympathy  had  been  strongly  excited  at 
Cambridge  wdth  the  aims  of  the  patriots  seeking  to 
free  liberty  bound  hand  and  foot  in  their  native  land. 
Especially  did  this  exist  in  the  Apostolic  band,  as  its 
members  had  now  begun  to  designate  themselves. 
With  these  the  influence  of  Sterling  was  then  pre- 
dominant. He  himself  was  engaged  heart  and  soul 
in  the  cause  of  the  Spanish  liberalists.  The  project 
appealed  strongly  indeed  to  men  of  ardent  natures 
fired  with  the  zeal  of  youth  which  often  leads  them  to 
rush  on  hopeless  enterprises,  and  sometimes  enables 
them  to  accomplish  apparent  impossibilities,  under  the 
divine  impulse  of  the  belief  that  what  ought  to  be  is 
to  be.  Two  men  engaged  in  this  expedition  there  were 
who  found  themselves  w^aiting  at  Gibraltar  for  an 
opportunity  to  make  a  descent  upon  Spain  and  raise 
there  the  standard  of  constitutional  liberty.  For- 
tunately for  them,  the  opportunity  was  not  allowed 
to  present  itself.     Finding  nothing  to  do,  or  rather 


UNIVERSITY  LIFE  91 

that  nothing  could  be  done,  they  returned  to  England. 
In  consequence,  they  were  saved  from  having  any 
share  in  the  later  tragic  end  of  the  enterprise.  These 
two  men  were  John  Mitchell  Kemble  and  Richard 
Chenevix  Trench.  Considering  the  nature  of  their 
respective  careers  in  life,  their  participation  in  this 
enterprise  creates  a  mild  surprise  in  the  modern 
reader. 

Some  of  the  Spaniards  engaged  in  this  revolutionary 
undertaking  were,  however,  on  the  borders  of  France. 
It  was  to  these  conspirators  that  Hallam  and  Tenny- 
son went.  To  them  they  bore  money  and  letters 
written  in  invisible  ink.  Early  in  July  the  two  Cam- 
bridge students  set  out  to  make  the  journey  and  to 
spend  in  this  novel  way  a  part  of  their  long  vacation. 
They  accomplished  their  mission  safely.  Tennyson, 
however,  was  not  altogether  favorably  impressed  with 
the  views  of  some  of  the  revolutionists  he  met.  To 
Hallam  and  him,  one  of  them,  so  far  as  his  imperfect 
utterance  would  permit,  confided  his  intention  to  cut 
the  throats  of  all  the  priests.  He  apologized  for  the 
difficulty  he  experienced  in  expressing  in  an  unknown 
tongue  various  aspirations  of  this  character.  He 
added,  however,  in  French,  ''But  you  know  my  heart." 
"And  a  pretty  black  one  it  is,"  was  the  comment 
Tennyson  made  to  himself.^  In  a  letter  sent  from 
Cambridge  in  December  of  this  year  Hallam  gave  to 
Trench  an  account  of  this  trip.  ' '  Alfred  went,  as  you 
know,  with  me,"  wrote  he,  "to  the  south  of  France, 

1  Mrs.  Ritchie 's  '  Recollections  of  Tennyson,  Ruskin  and  Browning, ' 
1892,  p.  23. 


92  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

and  a  wild,  bustling  time  we  had  of  it.  I  played  my 
part  as  conspirator  in  a  small  way,  and  made  friends 
with  two  or  three  gallant  men,  who  have  been  since 
trying  their  luck  with  Valdez."  There  are  two  refer- 
ences in  Tennyson's  published  verse  to  this  passage 
in  his  life.  One  is  in  the  seventy-first  poem  in  'In 
Memoriam. '    There  he  speaks  of 

The  Past 
In  which  we  went  thro'  summer  France. 

Again  he  refers  to  this  trip  in  the  little  piece,  first 
published  in  1864,  which  is  entitled  'In  the  Valley  of 
Cauteretz.'  In  that  he  speaks  of  having  walked  here 
two  and  thirty  years  before  with  one  that  he  loved. 
It  is  characteristic  of  the  demon  of  accuracy  which 
took  possession  of  Tennyson  in  his  later  life  that  he 
became  much  vexed  with  himself  for  having  written 
two  and  thirty  years  instead  of  one  and  thirty;  as  if 
any  one  besides  himself  would  know  the  precise  time 
when  the  poem  was  written.  The  very  year  of  his 
death  he  wished  to  alter  it,  and  was  only  persuaded  to 
let  it  stand  because  it  was  the  reading  with  which  the 
public  had  become  familiar.  Accuracy  of  the  sort 
just  indicated  is  of  highest  importance  in  a  work  deal- 
ing with  the  facts  of  history  or  biography.  In  a  work 
of  the  imagination  it  is  of  the  slightest  earthly  conse- 
quence. 

The  return  journey  was  not  made  on  foot.  On  the 
eighth  of  September,  the  two  adventurers  took  passage 
at  Bordeaux  on  the  steamer  '  Leeds '  which  was  sailing 
for  Dublin.    Before  he  went  on  this  journey,  however, 


UNIVERSITY  LIFE  93 

Tennyson  had  made  an  appeal  to  the  public  in  a  volume 
of  verse.  With  it  his  distinctively  literary  career  may 
be  said  to  have  begun.  The  work  appeared  in  the  early 
part  of  that  period  of  transition  which  was  going  on  in 
the  world  of  politics  and  letters.  Accordingly,  before 
we  can  make  ourselves  really  acquainted  with  the 
career  of  the  man  who  was  to  become  the  representa- 
tive voice  of  his  generation  or  can  understand  the 
influences  which  operated  to  hasten  or  retard  his  recep- 
tion by  the  general  public,  we  must  get,  in  the  first 
place,  a  clear  conception  of  the  literary  situation  as 
it  existed  at  the  time  of  Tennyson's  appearance  as 
an  author;  and  in  the  second  place,  a  general  knowl- 
edge of  the  writers  who  were  occupying  the  attention 
of  the  public  for  the  years  which  followed  that  appear- 
ance. Even  more  important  at  this  point  is  it  to  make 
a  survey  of  the  critical  literature  of  the  time  and  of 
the  influence  it  wielded.  This  latter  indeed  is  of  par- 
ticular consequence  because  of  the  poet's  abnormal 
sensitiveness  to  criticism  and  the  peculiar  influence  it 
exerted  upon  his  course  of  action.  In  any  account  of 
his  career  it  therefore  naturally  takes  precedence. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE   LITERARY   SITUATION   IN   THE   TRANSITION 

PERIOD 

Part  One 
Critical  Literature  of  the  Period 

Eeaders  of  'Pilgrim's  Progress'  will  remember  that 
Christian,  when  he  came  to  the  end  of  the  Valley  of 
the  Shadow  of  Death,  saw  lying  there  the  blood,  bones, 
ashes,  and  mangled  bodies  of  men  who  had  traversed 
that  road  formerly.  These  were  the  remains  of  those 
who  in  old  time  had  been  cruelly  put  to  death  by  two 
giants  dwelling  in  a  cave  near  at  hand.  Their  names 
were  Pope  and  Pagan.  Pagan,  he  found,  had  been 
dead  many  a  day;  and  Pope,  though  still  alive,  had 
grown  so  old  and  crazy  and  stiff  in  his  joints,  that  he 
could  do  little  more  than  sit  in  the  mouth  of  his  habita- 
tion and  grin  at  the  pilgrims  as  they  went  by,  and  bite 
his  nails  because  he  could  not  come  at  them. 

This  description  of  the  part  taken  by  the  two  giants, 
so  far  as  it  is  a  portrayal  of  Puritan  feeling,  is  a  not 
untrue  picture  of  the  position  which  according  to  the 
belief  of  large  numbers  was  held  by  the  'Edinburgh' 
and  'Quarterly'  reviews  during  the  first  third  of  the 
last  century.     The  opinion,  then  quietly  but  widely 


CRITICAL  LITERATURE  OF  THE  PERIOD       95 

accepted,  and  sometimes  expressed,  was  that  these 
periodicals,  if  they  could  not  bring  good  fortune  to 
those  they  favored,  could  bring  misfortune  and  ruin  to 
those  they  attacked.  If  for  any  cause  a  work  failed, 
which  they  chanced  to  notice  unfavorably,  the  result 
was  not  attributed  by  the  author  to  any  defect  in  the 
work  itself,  but  wholly  to  the  hostile  criticism  which 
it  had  received  from  one  or  both  of  these  powerful 
organs.  This  was  especially  true  of  the  'Edinburgh'; 
more  specially  true  of  it  when  it  reigned  without  a 
rival  from  its  commencement  in  1802  to  1809,  the  year 
in  which  the  'Quarterly'  was  set  on  foot.  Even  after 
that  time,  little  limit  seems  to  have  been  assigned  to 
its  power  to  elevate  or  depress.  Naturally,  according 
to  the  scale  of  the  particular  approval  or  censure  found 
in  its  columns,  its  editor  Jeffrey  was  correspondingly 
adored  or  hated. 

The  days  are  gone  by  so  completely  that  it  can 
hardly  be  said  that  they  are  remembered,  when  these 
two  great  quarterlies  were  mighty  powers  both  in  the 
world  of  literature  and  of  politics.  The  conditions 
which  then  gave  them  their  influence  have  now  dis- 
appeared. It  is  hardly  possible  for  us  even  to  con- 
ceive such  a  state  of  things  existing  as  is  indicated 
in  a  letter  written  from  London  by  Lockhart  to  Wil- 
liam Blackrsvood  towards  the  end  of  January,  1830. 
He  tells  his  correspondent  that  in  consequence  of  an 
article  in  the  last  'Quarterly,'  stocks  had  fallen  two 
per  cent.  This  the  Master  of  the  Mint  had  told  the 
Duke  of  Wellington.  Thereupon  the  Dictator,  as  Lock- 
hart  terms  the  Duke,  had  sent  for  Croker  and  Barrow 


96  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

to  the  Cabinet  Council  and  rowed  them.  They  in  turn 
sent  for  Murray  and  rowed  him.  Then  the  publisher 
took  his  turn  and  came  and  rowed  Lockhart.  "God 
knows  how  this  may  end,"  he  concluded, — "I  care 
not."^  The  information  given  by  the  author  himself 
of  the  effect  which  was  wrought  by  the  'Quarterly' 
article  may  have  been  exaggerated ;  but  it  is  manifest 
that  in  the  eyes  of  the  writer  it  would  seem  in  no  wise 
surprising  to  his  correspondent. 

Great  as  was  the  influence  melded  by  these  two  peri- 
odicals in  politics,  it  was  even  greater  in  literature.  It 
is  rarely  the  case  now  that  anything  they  say  raises 
even  as  much  as  a  ripple  on  the  current  of  contempo- 
rary criticism.  One  indeed  would  not  wish  even  in 
these  days  to  be  treated  disrespectfully  by  a  'Quar- 
terly' reviewer;  still  one  would  not  be  likely  to  lose 
much  sleep  over  it.  Only  under  peculiar  conditions 
does  its  most  unfavorable  notice  have  marked  effect 
upon  the  fortunes  of  the  work  attacked.  Accordingly, 
in  spite  of  our  acquaintance  with  the  ovine  nature  of 
man  in  the  matter  of  literary  judgments,  we  wonder 
that  the  educated  class  of  any  period  could  allow  their 
opinions  to  be  manufactured  for  them  by  these  self- 
constituted  arbiters.  Yet  this  they  unquestionably 
did  then.  It  was  done,  too,  on  the  grandest  scale. 
Exceptions  took  place  only  when  the  verdicts  pro- 
nounced ran  counter  to  the  feelings  or  prejudices  of 
the  reader  or  came  in  conflict  with  his  superior  knowl- 
edge. But  in  the  criticism  passed  upon  little-known 
authors  this  was  rarely  the  case.    Hence  the  decisions 

1 '  William  Blackwood  and  his  Sons, '  by  Mrs.  Oliphant,  Vol.  I,  p.  246. 


CRITICAL  LITERATURE  OF  THE  PERIOD       97 

announced  by  these  periodicals  were  usually  accepted 
without  hesitation  by  the  public. 

It  is  fair  to  say  that  the  possession  of  this  influence 
was  to  a  large  extent  honestly  earned.  There  is  no 
question  that  efforts  were  put  forth  by  the  quarterlies 
to  secure  the  ablest  and  best-informed  writers.  Hence 
on  many  topics  they  spoke  with  an  authority  that  could 
not  well  be  gainsaid.  On  points  where  knowledge  and 
scholarship  were  involved,  the  conclusions  they  came  to 
were  apt  to  be  right.  This  was  not  always  the  case. 
Certain  most  woeful  blunders  have  to  be  charged  to 
their  credit,  or  rather  discredit.  Still,  it  was  so  gen- 
erally; for  learning,  unlike  genius,  is  something  that 
can  be  tested,  can  be  weighed  in  the  balance.  Its  value 
can  therefore  be  exactly  ascertained  and  clearly  stated. 
The  only  exception  is  when  some  one  happens  to  come 
along  who  is  vastly  better  informed  upon  a  particular 
subject  than  any  one  else.  It  becomes  then  a  matter 
of  chance  whether  he  shall  be  deified  by  those  who 
know  less  than  he  or  denounced  by  those  who  igno- 
rantly  fancy  that  they  know  more. 

It  is  further  to  be  kept  in  mind  that  for  a  long  time 
the  quarterlies  had  the  field  of  higher  literary  criti- 
cism practically  to  themselves.  They  had  come  to  be 
the  only  organs  which  possessed  authority  recognized 
by  the  general  public.  For  more  than  half  a  century 
preceding  their  existence  there  had  been  periodicals 
which  had  paid  particular  attention  to  book-reviewing. 
To  that  indeed  some  of  the  original  ones  had  been 
exclusively  devoted.  These  were  the  two  which  bore 
the  names  of  the  'Monthly'  and  the  'Critical';  for 


98  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

previous  publications,  such  as  the  'Works  of  the 
Learned,'  were  in  many  ways  of  an  entirely  distinct 
character.  The  'Monthly'  began  in  1749,  the  'Critical' 
in  1756.  During  the  last  half  of  the  eighteenth  century 
these  flourished  with  a  vigor  and  repute  which  was 
but  little  affected  by  periodicals  of  a  similar  char- 
acter— such,  for  example,  as  the  'London,'  the  'Ana- 
lytical' and  the  'English  Review' — which  sprang  up 
every  now  and  then,  but  usually  lasted  only  a  few 
years.  These  two  which  had  first  occupied  the  field 
survived  into  the  nineteenth  century.  But  while  they 
continued  to  retain  something  of  an  audience,  the 
general  feebleness  of  their  contents  and  the  particular 
feebleness  of  their  conductors  and  contributors  grad- 
ually deprived  them  of  influence.  So  when  the  'Edin- 
burgh' appeared,  it  had  almost  a  clear  field  to  itself 
even  in  the  department  of  literature,  though  this  was 
but  a  portion  of  the  ground  it  set  out  to  cover.  The 
'Critical'  gave  up  the  ghost  after  a  number  of  years. 
The  'Monthly,'  however,  continued  to  exist  after  a 
fashion  down  to  nearly  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth 
century.  But  during  the  latter  portion  of  its  career 
it  never  had  much  effect  upon  public  opinion. 

Nor  was  the  influence  of  the  two  great  quarterlies 
seriously  affected  by  the  several  other  ventures  in  the 
same  field,  which  were  either  in  existence  when  they 
themselves  came  into  being  or  sprang  up  from  time  to 
time  afterward.  These  were  usually,  though  not  inva- 
riably, monthlies.  Some  of  them,  like  'The  Anti- 
Jacobin  Review,'  were  the  organs  of  parties.  Hence 
their  literary  criticism  was  always  more  or  less  influ- 


CRITICAL  LITERATURE  OF  THE  PERIOD       99 

enced  by  political  considerations.  A  similar  statement 
can  be  made  of  periodicals  of  another  kind,  such,  for 
example,  as  'The  British  Critic'  and  'The  Eclectic 
Ee\'ieAv, '  whose  reviewers  were  largely  under  the 
influence  of  sectarian  bodies.  On  that  very  account 
they  appealed  to  a  limited  class.  Besides  these  there 
were  a  nmnber  of  quarterlies  and  monthlies  that 
sprang  up  at  intervals  and  lasted  at  best  but  a  few 
years.  They  produced  no  profound  impression  in  any 
quarter.  A  fair  specimen  of  these  was  'The  British 
Review,'  which  was  begun  in  1811  and  lasted  till  1825. 
This  was  somewhat  disrespectfully  described  by  Lord 
Byron  as  "my  grandmother's  review":  a  by  no  means 
inapj)ropriate  title,  if  we  are  to  judge  it  by  the  char- 
acter of  its  contents.  Naturally,  none  of  these  im- 
paired the  influence  or  diminished  the  circulation  of 
the  two  great  quarterlies.  The  only  periodical  that 
came  to  contest  their  supremacy  was  'The  Westmin- 
ster Review,'  the  organ  of  the  philosophical  radicals; 
but  this  was  much  later.  It  did  not  make  its  appear- 
ance until  1824. 

The  first  of  the  real  agencies  that  came  to  displace 
the  quarterlies  from  the  position  of  influence  in  cur- 
rent criticism  which  they  held  during  the  first  third 
of  the  nineteenth  century  was  the  monthly  magazine. 
The  magazine  itself  had  sprung  into  existence  in  the 
earlier  half  of  the  eighteenth  century.  The  ones  that 
first  appeared — and  they  soon  came  to  be  numerous — 
contained  no  original  matter.  As  their  name  implies 
they  were  at  the  outset  nothing  but  storehouses  of  the 
material  in  the  shape  of  essays  which  the  newspapers 


100  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OP  TENNYSON 

had  previously  put  forth  or  of  the  news  which  they 
had  collected.  Accordingly,  they  were  published  at 
the  very  beginning  of  the  month  following  the  date 
they  bore — that  is,  for  example,  the  magazine  for  Jan- 
uary came  out  the  first  of  February.  This  was  a  prac- 
tice which  did  not  disappear  entirely  till  the  following 
century.  Naturally  they  did  not  at  first  deal  with 
reviews  of  current  literature.  In  the  change  which 
they  underwent  in  the  second  half  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  they  began  to  pay  some  attention  to  this  sub- 
ject also.  But  their  notices  of  books  were  pretty  gen- 
erally meager  as  regards  length  and  too  often  feeble 
as  regards  character.  Serious  work  of  this  sort  was 
mainly  left  to  the  two  leading  monthlies,  already  men- 
tioned, which  devoted  themselves  exclusively  to  book- 
reviewing.  All  this  was  changed,  however,  mth  the 
founding  of  'Blackwood's  Magazine'  in  April,  1817; 
or  rather  with  its  second  founding  in  October  of  the 
same  year. 

This  magazine  which  now  came  to  the  front  was 
essentially  different  in  character  and  conduct  from 
those  which  had  previously  borne  the  name.  In  its 
new  form  it  appealed  to  a  far  larger  circle  of  educated 
readers  than  did  the  quarterlies.  It  dealt  as  did  they 
with  political  and  literary  questions;  but  it  mingled 
with  its  discussion  of  topics  of  current  interest  matter 
which  they  did  not  pretend  to  furnish,  such,  for  illus- 
tration, as  fiction  and  poetry.  'Blackwood's'  speedily 
took  the  leadership  of  this  class  of  periodicals.  Owing 
mainly  to  the  talent  of  its  chief  contributor  who  was 
generally  assumed  to  be  the  editor,  it  made  for  itself 


CRITICAL  LITERATURE  OF  THE  PERIOD     101 

a  conspicuous  place  in  the  field  of  literary  criticism. 
From  the  time  it  passed  out  of  the  hands  of  its  origi- 
nal editors,  Pringle  and  Cleghorn,  it  came  to  be  dis- 
tinguished by  the  audacity,  billingsgate,  malice,  wrath, 
and  all  uncharitableness  which  when  manifested 
towards  others  than  ourselves — especially  towards 
those  opposed  to  us  in  opinion — are  above  all  things 
dear  to  the  carnal  heart.  Combined  also  with  its 
horse-play  and  its  abusiveness,  often  degenerating 
into  blackguardism,  was  wit  of  the  keenest  character. 
But  more  than  any  of  these  qualities,  the  critical  abil- 
ity displayed  in  its  columns,  with  its  generally  high 
and  cordial  appreciation  of  what  was  really  excellent 
in  literature,  recommended  it  to  a  class  of  readers  who 
may  or  may  not  have  sympathized  with  its  political 
views.  Furthermore,  it  came  out  with  unvarying 
regularity,  while  the  quarterlies  were  not  only  pub- 
lished at  much  greater  inters^als,  but  they  were  very 
apt  to  appear  just  when  it  suited  the  convenience  or 
laziness  of  their  editors.  The  date  on  the  number  of 
the  periodical  was  a  very  untrustworthy  indication  of 
the  date  of  its  appearance.  This  was  particularly  true 
of  the  'Quarterly'  under  Gifford's  editorship. 

'Blackwood's  Magazine'  set  a  new  standard  for 
publications  of  this  sort.  It  changed  very  materially 
their  character.  Many  of  them  naturally  clung  to  the 
old  methods;  but  in  the  path  now  opened  imitators 
soon  pressed  in.  It  is  only  necessary  here  to  mention 
'The  London  Magazine'  which  was  started  in  1820  but 
died  before  the  third  decade  of  the  century  was  com- 
pleted.   During  its  short  career,  however,  it  made  for 


102  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

itself  a  lasting  reputation  by  publishing  among  other 
things  the  'Essays  of  Elia'  and  the  'Confessions  of  an 
Opium-Eater.'  Then  'The  New  Monthly  Magazine' 
was  reconstituted  in  this  same  year  with  Thomas 
Campbell  as  its  editor,  a  position  he  held  until  1830. 
Neither  of  tliese  publications  took  the  place  in  popular 
estimation  occupied  by  '  Blackwood 's. '  It  was  not  till 
the  rise  in  London  of  a  new  periodical  of  its  own  politi- 
cal faith  that  its  leadership  was  at  all  shaken.  This 
was  'Eraser's  Magazine'  which  was  started  in  1831 
by  Hugh  Eraser,  and  Maginn,  an  old  contributor  to 
'Blackwood's,'  who  will  live  forever  in  literature  as 
the  Captain  Shandon  of  'Pendennis.'  At  the  outset, 
this  periodical  surpassed  in  its  brutality  and  the  gross- 
ness  of  its  personalities  its  northern  contemporary; 
but  it  also  gathered  to  its  support  many  of  the  very 
ablest  men  of  letters  flourishing  already,  or  just  begin- 
ning their  career ;  and  its  columns  mil  always  have  to 
be  consulted  by  him  who  wishes  to  ascertain  the  gen- 
eral trend  of  critical  opinion  prevalent  during  the 
transition  period  among  a  large  and  influential  class 
of  contributors  and  readers. 

But  with  us  the  magazine  has  largely  ceased  to  be  a 
vehicle  of  literary  criticism.  In  those  which  devote 
any  attention  to  it  at  all,  it  occupies  generally  a  subor- 
dinate place;  in  much  the  largest  number  of  periodi- 
cals of  this  class  it  occupies  no  place  worth  consider- 
ing. The  field  it  once  covered  is  now  largely  taken  by 
the  weeklies  and  the  dailies.  The  former  was  the 
agency  which  was  destined  ultimately  to  occupy,  after 
a  fashion,  the  place  once  filled  by  the  quarterlies  and 


CRITICAL  LITERATURE  OF  THE  PERIOD     103 

to  some  extent  subsequently  filled  by  the  magazines. 
At  the  opening  of  the  fourth  decade,  this  class  of 
periodicals  was  slowly  making  its  way  to  the  front. 
Early  in  the  century  there  had  been  several  attempts 
to  establish  weeklies  which  should  be  given  up  prin- 
cipally to  criticism.  None  of  these  met  with  any  per- 
manent success.  At  last  in  1817  the  publisher  Col- 
burn  started  'The  Literary  Gazette  and  Journal  of 
Belles  Lettres,  Arts,  Sciences,  etc'  Of  this  William 
Jerdan  became  in  the  course  of  the  same  year  a  part 
proprietor  and  the  editor.  After  various  ups  and 
do^vTis  it  was  placed  on  a  paying  basis.  At  the  begin- 
ning of  the  period  now  under  consideration,  it  was 
much  the  most  influential  of  the  purely  literary  week- 
lies then  existing  in  England.  Such  it  remained  for 
some  time  afterward.  This,  too,  in  spite  of  the  fact 
that  its  reviews  were  often  produced  more  largely  by 
the  agency  of  the  scissors  than  of  the  brains.  The  use 
of  this  mechanical  implement  perhaps  contributed 
materially  to  its  success ;  for  the  critical  acumen  of  the 
editor  was  something  that  no  intelligent  man  could 
take  seriously. 

The  prosperity  of  'The  Literary  Gazette'  naturally 
led  to  numerous  imitators.  Especially  during  the  third 
decade — in  particular  during  its  closing  years — a  num- 
ber of  these  new  competitors  for  popular  favor  sprang 
into  being.  This  one  fact  shows  clearly  that  it  was  in 
that  direction  that  criticism  was  finding  its  natural 
avenue  to  expression.  Against  all  these  rivals  Jerdan 
held  his  wav  for  a  while  undisturbed.    In  the  'Noctes 


104  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

Ambrosianae '  for  May,  1828,  Hogg,  the  Ettrick  Shep- 
herd, is  represented  as  saying,  ^'Nane  o'  a'  the  new 
weekly  periodicals  wull  ever  cut  out  the  Literary 
Gazette."  ''Never,  James,"  North  replies,  ''and  sim- 
ply for  one  reason — Mr.  Jordan  is  a  gentleman,  and  is 
assisted  by  none  but  gentlemen."  At  the  very  time 
these  words  of  Christopher  North  were  printed,  the 
new  weekly  was  in  existence — 'The  Athenasum' — 
which  was  to  perform  the  feat  he  had  declared  impos- 
sible. But  the  supremacy  of  'The  Literary  Gazette' 
was  as  yet  merely  threatened.  Belief  in  its  perma- 
nence and  its  power  still  continued  unshaken.  Henry 
Taylor,  in  commenting  upon  Southey's  uncompromis- 
ing independence,  not  to  say  defiance  of  criticism, 
w^rote  in  1831  to  a  correspondent  that  'The  Literary 
Gazette'  could  "do  almost  anything  to  the  sale  of  a 
book";  and  yet  in  spite  of  this,  Southey  had  written 
an  epigram  upon  William  Jordan,  its  editor,  because 
he  had  attacked  a  volume  of  Charles  Lamb's.  It  is 
hardly  necessary  to  observe  that  no  literary  journal 
was  ever  able  to  do  almost  anything  to  the  sale  of  a 
book.  Undoubtedly  a  popular  critical  organ  can  influ- 
ence favorably  or  unfavorably  the  reputation  of  a 
writer  or  a  work  for  a  limited  time;  for  the  majority 
of  readers  prefer  to  take  their  opinions  at  second  hand. 
But  the  result  is  never  permanent  in  any  case.  The 
help  or  harm  that  is  brought  or  wrought  by  such 
means  to  the  repute  or  sale  of  a  book  is  always  transi- 
tory. Still,  Taylor's  remark  is  worth  noting  as  indi- 
cating an  opinion  that  was  then  widely  prevalent  about 


CRITICAL  LITERATURE  OF  THE  PERIOD     105 

the  power  ^^^elded  by  this   particular  periodical  to 
benefit  or  to  injure. 

Another  class  of  weeklies,  which  later  became  com- 
mon, began  to  appear  in  considerable  numbers  about 
the  beginning  of  the  transition  period.  They  were 
political  as  well  as  literary  in  their  character,  perhaps 
more  distinctly  political  than  literary.  Their  proto- 
type was  'The  Literary  Examiner,'  which  had  been 
started  as  far  back  as  1808  by  the  Hunts,  John  and 
James  Henry  Leigh.  By  the  class  to  which  its  then 
unpopular  liberal  politics  appealed  this  periodical  was 
held  in  high  favor.  As  might  be  expected,  both  it  and 
its  editors  were  made  the  subjects  of  constant  vitupera- 
tion in  the  Tory  press  as  long  as  the  periodical  was 
under  their  management.  At  the  beginning  of  the 
period  under  consideration,  the  control  of  it  had  fallen 
into  the  hands  of  Albany  Fonblanque.  To  it  came  a 
few  years  later  as  literary  and  dramatic  critic  John 
Forster,  the  personal  friend  of  many  of  the  younger 
men  of  letters,  notably  of  Robert  Bro\vning  and 
Dickens.  The  junction  of  these  two  writers  made  the 
paper  for  a  long  time  a  powerful  agent  in  moulding 
public  opinion.  But  several  periodicals  of  this  nature, 
some  of  which  were  very  ably  conducted,  began  their 
existence  a  little  before  1830.  Of  these  one  of  the  most 
influential  was  'The  Atlas.'  It  was  founded  in  1826. 
It  had  for  a  long  time  a  high  reputation,  particularly 
so  during  the  fourth  and  fifth  decades.  Testimony  to 
the  estimation  in  which  it  was  held  comes  to  us  from 
widely  different  quarters.  In  1839  FitzGerald,  for 
instance,  speaks  of  it  as  "the  best  weekly  critic  of 


106  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

Music  and  all  other  things  that  I  know  of."^  In  Sep- 
tember, 1844,  Mrs.  Browning  describes  it  as  the  best 
of  the  newspapers  for  literary  notices,  though  in  the 
follo\ving  month  she  modified  this  opinion  by  except- 
ing 'The  Examiner.'  Of  the  periodicals  of  this  class 
then  flourishing  the  only  sur\dvor  is  'The  Spectator' 
which  was  established  in  1828  and  has  had  a  long  and 
honorable  career.  Particularly  was  this  true  of  it 
after  its  critical  columns  came  under  the  control  of 
Richard  Holt  Hutton  in  1859. 

The  critical  literature  of  the  daily  papers  often  car- 
ries now  a  good  deal  of  weight.  At  this  time,  however, 
it  could  hardly  be  said  to  exist  at  all.  When  it  did 
appear,  it  was  usually  of  little  importance.  It  was  not 
till  the  close  of  the  fourth  decade  that  the  dailies  began 
to  give  up  any  space  worth  considering  to  book- 
re^dewing.  Even  the  position  of  that  was  subordinate. 
Yet  noted  men,  or  men  destined  to  become  noted,  were 
sometimes  employed  in  this  particular  sort  of  work. 
Thackeray,  for  instance,  was  then  an  occasional  con- 
tributor of  such  articles  to  the  'Times.'  But  develop- 
ment in  this  direction  was  slow.  The  truth  is  that 
during  this  period  of  transition  a  close  connection  with 
any  newspaper,  no  matter  how  influential,  was  re- 
garded to  some  extent  as  a  social  stigma.  There  are 
singular  exhibitions  of  this  state  of  feeling  recorded 
in  the  letters  and  journals  of  the  time.  In  1826,  for 
instance,  Murray,  largely  under  the  inspiration  of  the 
then  young  Disraeli,  planned  a  great  Tory  organ.    It 

1  Letter  of  April  30,  1839.  'Letters  and  Literary  Eemains,'  Vol.  I, 
p.  48. 


CRITICAL  LITERATURE  OF  THE  PERIOD     107 

was  a  morning  paper  he  projected  which  was  to  be 
called  'The  Representative.'  In  1826  it  began  its 
existence.  After  a  checkered  career  of  six  months,  in 
which  it  had  cost  the  proprietor  twenty-six  thousand 
pounds,  it  gave  up  the  ghost.  A  great  effort  had  been 
made  to  secure  Lockhart  as  its  editor.  Disraeli  visited 
him,  in  behalf  of  the  publisher,  with  that  object  in 
view.  It  gives  a  vivid  picture  of  the  feelings  of  the 
time  that  Lockhart,  as  well  as  Lockhart 's  father-in- 
law,  felt  it  to  be  an  impossibility  for  him  to  enter  upon 
life  in  London  in  the  capacity  of  a  newspaper  editor. 
It  meant  a  descent  in  the  social  scale.  The  pill  was 
sugar-coated  for  him,  as  well  as  it  could  be,  by  Disraeli, 
who  grandiloquently  assured  him  that  he  would  come 
to  the  capital,  "not  to  be  an  editor  of  a  newspaper  but 
the  Director-General  of  an  immense  organ  and  at  the 
head  of  a  band  of  high-bred  gentlemen  and  important 
interests." 

This  lofty  description  of  his  position  and  powers  did 
not  tempt  Lockhart.  He  refused  the  offer.  He  refused 
it  too  on  the  ground  that  it  was  unsuitable  to  one  of  his 
station  in  life.  By  William  Wright,  a  barrister  of 
influence  who  corresponded  ^\dth  him  on  the  subject, 
Canning  is  also  reported  to  have  said  that  Lockhart 
could  come  to  London  as  editor  of  the  'Quarterly'  but 
not  as  editor  of  a  newspaper,  or  at  least  as  a  known 
or  reputed  editor.  '*I  told  Disraeli  before  he  left," 
continued  AVright,  ''he  had  a  very  delicate  mission, 
and  that  though  my  rank  in  life  was  different  to  your 
own,  having  no  relations  whose  feelings  could  be 
wounded  by  my  accepting  any  honest  employment,  I 


108  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

should  not  receive  an  offer  of  an  editorship  of  a  news- 
paper as  a  compliment  to  my  feelings  as  a  barrister 
and  a  gentleman,  however  complimentary  it  might  be 
to  my  talents."  To  the  same  effect  spoke  Sir  Walter 
Scott.  *'It  is  very  true,"  he  wrote  to  Murray,  ''that 
this  department  of  literature  may  and  ought  to  be 
rendered  more  respectable  than  it  is  at  present,  but  I 
think  this  is  a  reformation  more  to  be  wished  than 
hoped  for,  and  should  think  it  rash  for  any  young 
man,  of  whatever  talent,  to  sacrifice,  nominally  at 
least,  a  considerable  portion  of  his  respectability  in 
society  in  hopes  of  being  submitted  as  an  exception  to 
a  rule  which  is  at  present  pretty  general.  This  might 
open  the  door  to  love  of  money,  but  it  would  effectu- 
ally shut  it  against  ambition."^  These  words  were 
written  in  1825.  That  Scott  continued  to  hold  the  same 
sentiments  is  evident  from  a  letter  to  his  son-in-law  in 
1829  with  reference  to  a  proposal  that  the  latter  should 
be  connected  with  some  journal  which  the  Duke  of 
Wellington  was  wishing  to  purchase.  "Your  connec- 
tion with  any  newspaper,"  he  wrote  to  Lockhart, 
"would  be  disgrace  and  degradation.  I  would  rather 
sell  gin  to  the  poor  people  and  poison  them  that  way. '  '^ 
To  us  it  seems  a  peculiar  state  of  things  that  a  posi- 
tion as  the  editor  of  a  powerful  daily  like  the  'Times' 
or  the  'Chronicle'  of  those  days  should  be  reckoned  as 
involving  social  degradation,  while  the  editorship  of  a 
quarterly  periodical  could  be  taken  without  risking 
any  loss  of  standing,  if  it  did  not  even  carry  with  it  a 

1' Memoir  of  John  Murray,'  Vol.  II,  p.  197. 

2  A.  Lang's  'Life  and  Letters  of  Lockhart,'  Vol.  II,  pp.  51-52. 


CRITICAL  LITERATURE  OF  THE  PERIOD     109 

certain  distinction.  But  such  assuredly  seems  then  to 
have  been  the  case.  There  is  evidence  too  that  this 
state  of  feeling  continued  to  exist  years  later.  In  1835, 
Fanny  Kemble  Butler  published  her  journal  giving 
an  account  of  her  travels  in  the  United  States.  In  the 
course  of  it  she  mentioned  a  gentleman  of  the  press 
who  called  upon  her  and  with  whom  she  was  pleased. 
"He  seems  to  think  much,"  she  added,  "of  having  had 
the  honor  of  corresponding  with  sundry  of  the  small 
literati  of  London."^  This  was  bad  enough;  but  its 
atrocity  was  exceeded  by  a  note  which  was  appended. 
"Except  where  they  have  been  made  political  tools," 
were  its  words,  "newspaper  writers  and  editors  have 
never,  I  believe,  been  admitted  into  good  society  in 
England."  It  is  little  wonder  that  her  work  was 
reviewed  with  a  severity  to  which  she  had  previously 
been  little  accustomed.  She  received  in  profusion 
reminders  that  her  own  reputation  was  due  to  the 
very  men  she  affected  to  despise. 

The  monthlies  and  the  weeklies  were  in  full  activity 
at  the  beginning  of  the  fourth  decade.  They  were 
steadily  sapping  the  influence  of  the  two  great  quar- 
terlies, but  they  had  not  seriously  impaired  it  to  out- 
ward view.  They  merely  threatened  it.  True  it  was 
that  the  original  editors  to  whom  their  success  had 
been  largely  owing  had  disappeared  from  the  stage 
of  active  management.  Jeffrey  had  been  succeeded  by 
Macvey  Napier,  a  man  possibly  of  engaging  character, 
but  certainly  of  altogether  less  ability  than  his  prede- 
cessor.   In  this  respect  the  'Quarterly'  was  more  for- 

I'.Tournal  of  a  Eesidence  in  America,'  Paris,  1835,  pp.  105-106. 


110  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

tunate.  Gifford,  who  had  imparted  to  that  periodical 
much  of  its  peculiar  acerbity,  had  retired  from  its 
editorship  in  1824;  he  hated  authors  with  a  zeal  that 
would  have  done  credit  to  a  feudal  baron.  Two  years 
later  he  died.  But  the  spirit  in  which  it  had  been  con- 
ducted continued  to  live  in  Lockhart,  who  after  the 
brief  sway  of  John  Taylor  Coleridge,  held  the  reins 
until  the  spring  of  1853.  In  consequence  of  his  abilities 
and  the  position  he  held  as  the  head  of  this  review, 
he  was  for  a  long  while  one  of  the  most  prominent 
figures  in  the  critical  world,  particularly  so  during  the 
decade  from  1830  to  1840.  One  result  was  that  the 
influence  of  the  'Quarterly,'  at  least,  if  not  of  the 
'Edinburgh,'  appears  to  have  been  for  a  time  but  little 
diminished. 

Singular  illustrations  of  the  feeling  entertained 
about  these  two  periodicals  were  manifested  in  quar- 
ters where  we  should  least  expect  to  see  it.  Bulwer, 
for  instance,  was  the  most  popular  of  living  English 
novelists  for  at  least  the  first  half  of  the  thirties.  His 
works,  as  fast  as  they  were  produced,  invariably  went 
from  edition  to  edition.  That  they  hit  the  taste  of  the 
public  is  manifest  by  their  success  even  when  they 
appeared  anonymously.  They  were  spoken  of  in 
terms  of  high  praise  by  men  who  were  none  too  lavish 
of  their  commendation.  They  were  translated  into 
foreign  tongues.  But  all  this  did  not  content  him. 
The  one  thing  that  rankled  above  all  others  in  his 
bosom  was  that  in  neither  of  the  two  quarterlies  had 
his  name  been  mentioned  either  for  praise  or  blame. 
Their  failure  to  review  his  works  was  the  one  distinc- 


CRITICAL  LITERATURE  OF  THE  PERIOD     111 

tion  without  which  all  the  others  apparently  were  as 
naught.  His  friends  complained  of  it,  while  affecting 
to  hold  it  in  contempt.  In  May,  1831,  Miss  Landon 
contributed  to  'The  New  Monthly  Magazine'  an  arti- 
cle upon  the  novelist.  It  could  not  have  been  more 
eulogistic,  not  to  say  fulsome,  if  it  had  been  dictated 
to  the  writer  by  Bulwer  himself.  ''We  cannot  but 
remark, ' '  she  said  in  the  course  of  it,  ' '  on  the  singular 
silence  preserved  toward  the  most  rising  author  of 
their  day,  in  the  two  pseudo-called  great  Reviews,  the 
Edinburgh  and  the  Quarterly."  The  former  speed- 
ily repented  of  its  neglect.  It  published  a  laudatory 
criticism  of  certain  of  Bulwer 's  novels  in  which  it 
apologized  for  its  delay  in  not  having  noticed  them 
before.  Not  so  Lockhart,  nor  indeed  his  immediate 
successor.  No  review  of  Bulwer 's  works  appeared  in 
the  'Quarterly'  until  1865. 

The  character  of  Lockhart  is  something  of  a  puzzle. 
The  notices  of  him  that  have  been  jjublished  have  very 
largely  come  from  his  friends,  or,  at  all  events,  from 
friendly  sources.  Yet  over  none  of  the  critics  of  tliis 
period  hangs  so  pervasive  a  cloud  of  distrust  and  dis- 
like. In  the  so-called  Chaldee  Manuscript  which  came 
out  in  the  seventh  number  of  'Blackwood's  Maga- 
zine,' and  created  at  the  time  an  unparalleled  and  to 
the  modern  reader  a  somewhat  incomprehensible  sen- 
sation, he  was  represented,  doubtless  by  himself,  as 
"the  scorpion  which  delighteth  to  sting  the  faces  of 
men."  The  appellation  was  constantly  applied  to 
him  later  in  a  way  and  to  an  extent  he  probably  came 
not  altogether  to  like.    Whether  justly  entitled  to  it 


112  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

or  not,  there  clung  to  him  something  of  the  middle- 
age  superstition  about  that  insect  which  represented 
it  as  carrying  a  flattering  face  and  a  stinging  tail. 
The  comparison  was  not  altogether  appropriate.  The 
latter  characteristic  might  be  conceded  to  Lockhart; 
but  no  one  ever  charged  him  with  exhibiting  the 
former.  The  Viper  was  another  epithet  frequently 
bestowed  upon  him.  It  cannot  be  maintained  that  such 
an  appellation  carries  with  it  the  idea  of  great  per- 
sonal popularity. 

It  is  hard  indeed  to  hit  upon  the  exact  origin  of  the 
general  prejudice  which  seems  always  to  have  existed 
against  Lockhart.  He  was  undoubtedly  a  man  of  cold 
and  reserved  manner ;  but  it  seems  as  if  he  must  have 
developed  to  a  disproportionate  degree  the  faculty  of 
making  himself  disagreeable,  to  have  begot  indiffer- 
ence so  universal,  where  it  did  not  pass  over  into 
active  dislike.  A  professional  reviewer  has  naturally 
his  enemies ;  but  he  has  also  his  friends.  Of  the  latter, 
Jeffrey  had  hosts.  So  had  John  Wilson.  Even  Gif- 
ford,  the  fierce  and  implacable,  had  found  men  to 
cherish  towards  him  a  lukewarm  feeling  which  might 
perhaps  deserve  to  be  styled  regard ;  and  what  is  much 
harder  to  understand,  he  had  found  men  to  admire  his 
lyric  verse.  But  while  such  persons  may  have  existed 
in  the  case  of  Lockhart,  and  doubtless  did  exist,  and 
perhaps  in  considerable  numbers,  it  is  no  easy  matter 
to  find  proof  of  the  fact.  Praise  is  not  unfrequently 
paid  to  his  works.  Few  are  the  passages,  however, 
which  one  comes  across  in  the  journals  or  correspond- 
ence of  this  period  to  indicate  that  he  himself  was 


CRITICAL  LITERATURE  OF  THE  PERIOD     113 

looked  upon  mth  affection  by  any  one  outside  of  his 
immediate  family  circle,  or  those  with  whom  he  shared 
the  closest  personal  ties.  Two  bulky  volumes,  giving 
an  account  of  his  career,  were  brought  out  a  few  years 
ago  by  a  brother  Scotchman.  They  are  avowedly  of 
the  nature  of  an  argument  for  the  defence.  Every- 
thing in  his  favor  that  can  be  directly  related  or  indi- 
rectly suggested  is  related  or  suggested.  Everything 
which  seems  to  bear  hard  upon  his  course  is  either 
softened  or  explained  away,  or  even  converted  to  his 
credit.  The  reader  indeed  after  finishing  the  biog- 
raphy rises  from  its  perusal  not  quite  clear  in  his  mind 
whether  it  is  the  life  of  Lockhart  with  which  he  has 
been  concerned  or  with  the  life  of  one  of  the  saints. 
Yet  the  special  pleading  of  the  work  has  done  little  or 
nothing  towards  rehabilitating  the  character  of  its 
subject.  It  seems  rather  to  have  impressed  men  with 
the  justice  of  Dr.  Johnson's  dictum  that  a  Scotchman 
must  be  a  very  sturdy  moralist  who  does  not  love  Scot- 
land better  than  truth,  and  that  he  will  always  love  it 
better  than  inquiry. 

The  influence  of  a  critical  article  depends  largely 
upon  the  repute  of  the  periodical  in  which  it  makes  its 
appearance.  This  is  inevitably  the  case  when  the  name 
of  the  reviewer,  as  usually  happens,  is  withheld. 
Nothing  marks  more  distinctly  the  difference  between 
the  past  and  the  present  than  the  incomparably 
greater  importance  once  attached  to  the  utterance 
of  the  quarterlies  over  those  of  the  monthlies  or  over 
those  of  any  other  vehicle  of  criticism.  This  state  of 
mind  was  indeed  disappearing  at  the  beginning  of  the 


114  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

fourth  decade  of  the  century.  In  time  it  disappeared 
altogether.  But  it  continued  to  prevail  then.  We 
cannot  indeed  understand  the  feelings  of  both  authors 
and  readers  during  this  period  of  transition  mthout 
a  clear  perception  of  the  attitude  of  the  public  towards 
these  two  classes  of  periodicals.  To  all  outward 
appearance  the  inertia  of  past  movement  was  still 
carrying  the  quarterlies  along.  Though  they  had 
really  lost  the  commanding  position  they  once  held, 
the  fact  escaped  for  some  time  the  notice  of  them- 
selves as  well  as  that  of  their  readers.  A  dozen  years 
before,  their  supremacy  could  not  have  been  questioned 
for  a  moment.  The  far  higher  position  they  occupied 
in  comparison  with  other  organs  of  criticism  is  brought 
out  clearly  in  the  difference  of  the  effect  wrought  upon 
public  opinion  by  two  noted  attacks  on  Keats  which 
appeared  in  the  representatives  of  these  two  classes 
of  periodicals — the  one  in  a  quarterly,  the  other  in  a 
monthly. 

In  'Blackwood's  Magazine'  for  October,  1817,  came 
out  the  first  of  a  series  of  articles  upon  what  was 
called  The  Cockney  School  of  Poetry.  It  was  followed 
by  a  second  article  in  the  same  year,  and  by  a  third 
and  fourth  in  July  and  August  of  the  year  following. 
They  were  all  signed  Z.  Three  of  these  articles  were 
devoted  to  an  attack  upon  Leigh  Hunt  as  the  chief 
doctor  or  professor  of  the  so-called  Cockney  School. 
That  author  whom  we  are  now  apt  to  think  of  as  a 
lively  and  amiable  essayist  was  in  the  early  days  of  the 
century  recognized  as  an  aggressive,  trenchant,  and 
outspoken  leader-writer.     He  had  for  years  aroused 


CRITICAL  LITERATURE  OF  THE  PERIOD     115 

the  wrath  of  the  government  periodicals  by  the  liberal 
principles  he  constantly  advocated.  In  particular  he 
had  sent  a  shock  through  all  Torydom  by  the  reflections 
which  he  had  cast  both  upon  the  character  and  the 
personal  appearance  of  the  Prince  Regent.  In  one  of 
the  organs  of  the  government  party,  the  official  head 
of  the  state  had  been  plastered  mth  the  most  sicken- 
ing adulation.  Hardly  any  laudatory  phrases  were 
missed  in  the  encomiums  passed  upon  him.  Among 
other  tributes  to  his  perfections  he  had  been  styled 
''an  Adonis  in  loveliness."  The  w^hole  characteriza- 
tion aroused  Hunt's  ire.  He  had  no  hesitation  in  giv- 
ing vent  to  it.  This  Adonis  in  loveliness  he  described 
as  "a  corpulent  gentleman  of  fifty."  He  went  on 
further  to  say  that  "this  delightful,  blissful,  mse, 
pleasant,  honourable,  virtuous,  true,  and  immortal 
Prince" — all  these  epithets  had  been  applied  to  him 
in  'The  Morning  Post' — "was  a  violator  of  his  word, 
a  libertine  over  head  and  ears  in  debt  and  disgrace, 
a  despiser  of  domestic  ties,  the  companion  of  gamblers 
and  demi-reps,  a  man  who  had  just  closed  half  a  cen- 
tury without  one  single  claim  on  the  gratitude  of  his 
country  or  the  respect  of  posterity.'"  Naturally  this 
was  not  the  sort  of  language  to  conciliate  the  favor 
of  the  Tory  organs.  From  that  time  for  years  to  come 
they  let  no  occasion  slip  to  attack  Hunt  upon  every 
imaginable  pretext. 

'Blackwood's  Magazine'  especially  distinguished 
itself  as  his  assailant.  In  the  articles  just  mentioned 
there  was  practically  no  limit  to  the  abuse  heaped  upon 

1  'The  Examiner,'  March  22,  1812. 


116  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

this  underbred  person,  as  he  was  designated,  this  ple- 
beian both  in  rank  and  mind  as  well  as  in  station  and 
society.  But  it  was  particularly  upon  the  score  of  the 
immorality  of  his  writings  that  attack  against  him 
was  here  directed.  Nobody  indeed  can  be  so  pure- 
minded  as  a  critic  when  he  fancies  he  has  an  oppor- 
tunity to  vent  on  this  ground  his  dislike  of  an  author. 
In  particular,  the  volume  entitled  'The  Story  of 
Eimini,'  which  had  come  out  in  1816,  was  subjected  to 
the  most  virulent  denunciation.  In  his  zeal  for  purity, 
the  reviewer  wrought  himself  up  almost  to  a  frenzy 
which  has  now  a  distinctly  comical  aspect.  It  was  in 
the  following  chastened  style  that  his  third  article 
began.  ''Our  hatred  and  contempt  of  Leigh  Hunt  as 
a  writer,"  it  said,  "is  not  so  much  owing  to  his  shame- 
less irreverence  to  his  aged  and  afflicted  king — to  his 
profligate  attacks  on  the  character  of  his  king's  sons — 
to  his  low-born  insolence  to  that  aristocracy  with 
whom  he  would  in  vain  claim  the  alliance  of  one  illus- 
trious friendship — to  his  paid  panderism  to  the  vilest 
passions  of  that  mob  of  which  he  is  himself  a  fire- 
brand— to  the  leprous  crust  of  self-conceit  with  which 
his  whole  moral  being  is  indurated — to  that  loathsome 
vulgarity  which  constantly  clings  round  him  like  a 
vermined  garment  from  St.  Giles' — to  that  irritable 
temper  which  keeps  the  unhappy  man,  in  spite  even  of 
his  vanity,  in  a  perpetual  fret  with  himself  and  all  the 
world  beside,  and  that  shews  itself  equally  in  his 
deadly  enmities  and  capricious  friendships, — our 
hatred  and  contempt  of  Leigh  Hunt,  we  say,  is  not  so 
much  owing  to  these  and  other  causes,  as  to  the  odious 


CRITICAL  LITERATURE  OF  THE  PERIOD     117 

and  unnatural  harlotry  of  his  polluted  muse.'"  This 
is  a  good  illustration  of  the  methods  of  criticism  much 
in  vogue  in  the  early  part  of  the  nineteenth  century  in 
even  the  highest  literary  periodicals.  Delicacy  of 
satire,  incisiveness,  point,  were  qualities  rarely  dis- 
played. Instead  was  a  kind  of  personal  attack,  slang- 
whanging,  vociferous,  brutal.  There  were  doubtless 
those  who  then  considered  it  powerful  criticism. 

The  first  three  numbers  of  the  articles  on  the  Cock- 
ney School  had  been  devoted  to  Hunt,  for  the  sake  of 
attacking  whom  the  whole  series  had  evidently  been 
undertaken.  But  as  one  man  could  not  well  be  turned 
into  a  school,  it  was  necessary  to  have  some  one  else 
to  assail.  Shelley  and  others  were  under  considera- 
tion ;  but  the  choice  fell  at  last  upon  Keats.  He  was  a 
personal  friend  of  Hunt's,  he  had  been  praised  by  him, 
and  in  turn  had  written  lines  in  his  praise.  Accord- 
ingly he  was  selected  as  the  second  subject  of  abuse. 
The  volume  of  his  'Poems'  which  had  appeared  in 
1817  had  been  followed  by  'Endymion'  in  1818.  These 
two  furnished  the  pretext  for  the  criticism  which  was 
directed  not  against  the  works  but  against  the  man. 
The  article-  began  with  a  discourse  on  the  wide  preva- 
lence of  the  poetical  malady  which  was  raging  uncon- 
trolled through  the  land.  The  case  of  Keats  in  partic- 
ular was  distressing.  ''This  young  man,"  said  the 
reviewer,  "appears  to  have  received  from  nature 
talents  of  an  excellent,  perhaps  even  of  a  superior 
order — talents  which,  devoted  to  the  purposes  of  any 

1 '  Blackwood 's  Magazine, '  Vol.  Ill,  p.  453. 
2  Hid.,  Vol.  Ill,  pp.  519-524. 


118  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

useful  profession,  must  have  rendered  him  a  respect- 
able, if  not  an  eminent  citizen."  He  then  went  on  to 
observe  that  Keats  had  been  destined  to  the  career  of 
medicine,  and  had  been  apprenticed  some  years  before 
to  a  worthy  apothecary.  But  all  his  prospects  had 
been  undone  by  a  sudden  attack  of  the  poetical  malady, 
though  from  what  cause  was  unknown.  '^  Whether 
Mr.  John,"  he  continued,  "had  been  sent  home  with  a 
diuretic  or  composing  draught  to  some  patient  far 
gone  in  the  poetical  mania,  we  have  not  heard. ' '  How- 
ever, the  mischief  was  done,  and  of  late  the  symptoms 
had  been  terrible.  ' '  The  phrenzy  of  the  '  Poems, '  "  he 
added,  ''was  bad  enough  in  its  way;  but  it  did  not 
alarm  us  half  so  seriously  as  the  calm,  settled,  imper- 
turbable, drivelling  idiocy  of  Endymion. ' '  The  rest  of 
the  article  is  very  much  in  the  same  style  as  this  choice 
beginning.  ' '  Mr.  Hunt, ' '  said  the  reviewer,  "  is  a  small 
poet,  but  he  is  a  clever  man.  Mr.  Keats  is  a  still 
smaller  poet,  and  he  is  only  a  boy  of  pretty  abilities 
which  he  has  done  everything  in  his  power  to  spoil." 
The  article  concluded  with  this  piece  of  advice.  "It 
is  a  better  and  a  wiser  thing,"  said  the  critic,  "to  be 
a  starved  apothecary  than  a  starved  poet;  so  back  to 
your  shop  Mr.  John,  back  to  'plasters,  pills,  and  oint- 
ment boxes,'  etc.  But  for  Heaven's  sake,  young  San- 
grado,  be  a  little  more  sparing  of  extenuatives  and 
soporifics  in  your  practice  than  you  have  been  in  your 
poetry. ' ' 

It  is  safe  to  say  that  nothing  more  coarsely  and 
vulgarly  abusive  ever  appeared  under  the  guise  of 
criticism  in  what  purported  to  be  a  respectable  periodi- 


CKITICAL  LITERATURE  OF  THE  PERIOD     119 

cal.  Equally  is  it  true  that  nothing  more  insolent  was 
ever  written  by  a  man  of  talent  about  a  man  of  genius ; 
for  there  is  really  little  doubt  of  the  correctness  of  the 
general  opinion  which  then  and  since  has  ascribed 
the  authorship  of  these  articles  to  Lockhart.  Where 
the  secret  has  been  so  jealously  guarded  absolute  proof 
cannot  be  furnished.  At  a  later  period  no  one  could 
have  been  found  anywhere  eager  to  claim  the  credit 
of  the  attack  on  Keats.  Indeed  it  is  fair  to  say  that 
even  at  the  time  itself  there  were  those  who  perhaps 
sympathizing  with  the  views  expressed  in  the  article 
had  yet  the  grace  to  be  ashamed  of  its  character. 
Naturally  the  admirers  of  Lockhart — ^never  a  numerous 
body — have  been  anxious  in  later  days  to  relieve  him 
of  the  discredit  of  having  written  it.  But  the  utmost 
they  can  say  for  their  view  is  that  the  charge  is  *'not 
proven."  That  indeed  might  be  expected  to  be  the 
case.  Still  the  evidence  is  morally  convincing.  The 
articles  signed  Z.  have  all  the  characteristics  of  his 
style.  The  opinions  expressed  in  them  are  the  opinions 
he  expressed  elsewhere.  As  late  as  1828  in  his  review 
of  or  rather  invective  against  Leigh  Hunt's  'Lord 
Byron  and  Some  of  his  Contemporaries,'  he  remarked 
in  referring  to  Keats  that  ''our  readers  have  probably 
forgotten  all  about '  Endymion,  a  poem, '  and  the  other 
works  of  this  young  man,  the  all  but  universal  roar  of 
laughter  with  which  they  were  received  some  ten  or 
twelve  years  ago. "^  He  also  spoke  of  'Endymion'  as 
one  of  a  number  of  volumes  already  "sunk  to  the 
bottom  of  the  waters  of  oblivion."    In  fact,  there  are 

1  'Quarterly  Review,'  Vol.  XXXVII,  p.  416,  March,  1828. 


120  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

certain  phrases  in  this  review  which  are  almost 
identical  Avith  those  contained  previously  in  the  '  Black- 
wood' article.  Furthermore,  as  Tsill  be  found  later, 
these  opinions  about  Keats  were  repeated  in  his 
review  of  Tennyson. 

It  is  to  the  credit  of  the  sense  of  shame  of  the  con- 
tributors to  'Blackwood'  that  those  connected  with 
the  magazine  never  conceded  the  fact  of  any  particular 
person  being  designated  as  the  author  of  these  scur- 
rilous articles.  They  invariably  denied  the  imputation 
with  blushing  truth  or  unblushing  mendacity.  Often 
they  were  hard  put  to  it.  Maginn,  for  instance, 
writing  to  William  Blaclnvood  from  London  in  1823 
tells  him  of  having  met  Croly.  ''I  dined  with  him," 
he  said,  "in  company  with  an  insufferable  wretch  of 

the  name  of ,  who  knows  everything  of  'Maga' 

that  Croly  knows,  and  who  boasts  of  enjoying  the 
confidence  of  L."  By  L.  he  meant  Lockhart.  "I 
hope,"  he  continued,  *'tliis  is  impossible,  for  the 
creature  conducts  some  unheard-of  paper  in  London, 
and  is  one  of  the  press  gang.  He  told  me  many  other 
things,  that  he  knew  L.  to  be  Z,,  for  he  had  it  from  his 
OT\Ti  lips.  Surely  L.  could  not  be  such  a  spoony."^ 
Maginn  lied  like  a  good  comrade.  He  denied  flatly  this 
assertion  of  the  authorship,  and  in  the  lack  of  a  more 
satisfactory  place  to  put  the  writer,  he  insisted  that 
there  was  reason  to  believe  that  the  person  who  signed 
himself  Z.  was  at  that  time  in  Germany. 

The  point,  however,  which  concerns  us  here  more 
particularly,  is,  that  this  notice  of  Keats  in  'Black- 

1  'William  Blackwood  and  his  Sons,'  by  Mrs.  Oliphant,  Vol.  I,  p.  397. 


CRITICAL  LITERATURE  OF  THE  PERIOD     121 

wood'  for  August,  1818,  was  followed  the  next  month 
by  a  review  of  'Endymion'  which  appeared  in  the 
thirty-seventh  number  of  the  'Quarterly.'  This  num- 
ber, to  be  sure,  bears  the  date  of  April.  It  was,  how- 
ever, not  actually  published  until  towards  the  close 
of  September,  'The  Quarterly  Review'  in  those  days 
being  usually  as  much  behind  the  times  in  its  date  of 
publication  as  it  was  in  its  views.^  The  author  of  the 
article  is  conceded  to  have  been  John  Wilson  Croker. 
It  consisted  of  but  four  pages.  The  critic  began  by 
honestly  confessing  that  he  had  been  unable  to  read 
'Endymion'  through.  He  had  made  efforts,  he  said, 
as  superhuman  as  the  story  itself  appeared  to  be,  to 
finish  it,  but  he  had  found  it  impossible  to  struggle 
beyond  the  first  of  the  four  books.  He  had  the  conso- 
lation, however,  of  knowing  that  he  was  no  better 
acquainted  T\4th  the  meaning  of  the  book  through 
which  he  had  painfully  toiled,  than  with  that  of  the 
three  into  which  he  had  not  looked.  He  affected  to 
doubt  that  Keats  was  actually  the  name  of  the  poet, 
for  he  could  hardly  believe  that  a  man  in  his  senses 
would  put  his  real  name  to  such  a  rhapsody.  He  did 
not  indeed  deny  that  the  author  had  powers  of  lan- 
guage, rays  of  fancy,  and  gleams  of  genius;  but  he 
was  a  disciple  of  the  new  school  of  what  had  some- 
where been  called  cockney  poetry.  This,  he  added, 
''may  be  defined  to  be  the  most  incongruous  ideas  in 
the  most  uncouth  language."    As  the  disciple  of  this 

1  No.  CXVII  advertised  as  published  this  day  in  the  '  London  Chroni- 
cle' of  September  26.  It  had  previously  been  advertised  as  about  to  be 
published  in  the  issue  of  September  23,  and  September  25. 


122  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

new  school  Keats  was  a  copyist  of  Leigh  Hunt,  but 
more  unintelligible,  almost  as  rugged,  twice  as  diffuse, 
and  ten  times  more  tiresome  and  absurd  than  his 
prototjT)e. 

Though  this  review  was  contemptuous  throughout, 
it  contained  nothing  of  the  personal  scurrility  which 
disgraced  the  article  in  *  Blackwood. '  On  the  whole, 
too,  it  was  inferior  to  the  latter  in  interest  and  power. 
But  it  shows  the  far  higher  estimate  held  by  the  quar- 
terly over  the  monthly  periodical  that  the  attack  in 
the  former  was  far  more  noted  then  and  indeed  has 
remained  so  ever  since.  To  this  day  it  has  steadily 
served  as  one  of  the  most  conspicuous  stock  examples 
to  show  the  malignant  and  absurd  criticism  which 
often  distinguished  that  periodical.  At  the  time,  it 
was  celebrated  by  Byron  as  having  caused  the  death 
of  Keats.  It  called  forth  the  indignant  monody  of 
Shelley  on  his  dead  friend.  But  while  the  article  in 
the  'Quarterly'  created  all  this  sensation,  the  still 
more  vituperative  and  much  longer  one  in  'Black- 
wood' attracted  but  comparatively  little  attention 
from  contemporaries.  Nor  has  it  excited  much  com- 
ment in  later  times.  This  result  was  not  at  all  due  to 
the  superiority  of  the  former.  It  was  really  deter- 
mined by  the  respective  positions  in  popular  estima- 
tion held  by  the  two  classes  of  publications.  The 
unfortunate  thing  for  the  periodicals  in  which  the 
attacks  upon  Keats  appeared,  was  not  their  brutality, 
nor  their  insolence,  but  the  obtuseness  of  critical 
perception  which  characterized  them,  the  incapacity 
to  comprehend  that  a  great  poet  had  made  his  appear- 


CRITICAL  LITERATURE  OF  THE  PERIOD     123 

ance.  It  tends  to  produce  gloomy  views  of  the  general 
banality  of  criticism  to  find  two  of  the  most  noted 
reviewers  of  the  time  speaking  of  a  sky-soarer  like 
Keats  as  being  the  disciple  of  a  twitterer  of  the  hedges 
like  Leigh  Hunt. 

It  has  been  fashionable  in  these  later  days  among 
men  who  have  never  read  a  line  of  his  writings  to 
talk  contemptuously  of  Jeffrey's  criticism,  as  if  the 
supremacy  in  this  particular  which  he  acquired  and 
maintained  among  the  giants  of  the  Georgian  era  was 
somehow  due  to  fortuitous  circumstances.  Here  is  not 
the  place  to  discuss  his  merits  or  demerits.  But  it 
increases  immensely  one's  respect  for  his  literary 
perspicacity  to  find  him  a  little  later  than  the  appear- 
ance of  the  review  in  the  'Quarterly'  declaring  of 
'Endymion'  that  with  all  the  obscure,  unnatural,  and 
absurd  passages  to  be  found  in  it,  he  who  would 
represent  the  whole  poem  as  despicable  must  either 
have  no  notion  of  poetry  or  no  regard  for  the  truth. 
He  went  further  and  added  that  he  did  not  know  of 
any  book  which  he  would  sooner  employ  as  a  test  to 
ascertain  whether  any  one  had  in  him  a  native  relish 
for  poetry  and  a  genuine  sensibility  to  its  intrinsic 
charm.  Jeffrey  not  merely  recognized  the  genius  of 
Keats,  but  had  no  hesitation  in  proclaiming  it — an 
easy  thing  to  do  twenty  or  thirty  years  later,  but  then 
evident  to  but  few,  and  certain  to  meet  with  unqualified 
dissent  from  many  and  perhaps  most.  We  know  how 
bitterly  Byron  resented  this  particular  review  of 
'Endymion'  by  Jeffrey,  for  he  had  been  irritated  to 
the  depths  of  his  soul  by  the  contemptuous  opinion 


124  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

expressed  by  Keats  of  his  own  poetic  god,  Pope.  His 
words  furnish  a  still  further  illustration  of  the  all- 
commanding  position  occupied  by  the  periodical  over 
which  that  critic  presided.  ''Nobody,"  he  wrote  to 
Murray  in  1820,  "could  be  prouder  of  the  praises  of 
the  Edinburgh  than  I  was,  or  more  alive  to  their  cen- 
sure, as  I  showed  in  E[nglish]  B[ards]  and  S[cotch] 
R[eviewers].  At  present  all  the  men  they  have  ever 
praised  are  degraded  by  that  insane  article."  Byron 
did  not,  but  both  Lockhart  and  Croker  did,  live  long 
enough  to  see  their  judgments  contemptuously  spurned 
by  the  cultivated  public;  yet  it  is  a  satisfaction  to 
know  that  at  the  time  itself  their  verdict  was  almost 
disdainfully  set  aside  by  him  whom  his  contemporaries 
generally  recognized  as  the  supreme  arbiter  of  poetic 
ability. 

Any  survey  taken  of  the  critical  literature  of  any 
period  almost  inevitably  leads  to  a  depreciatory  esti- 
mate of  its  character.  Every  generation  has  always 
the  fullest  confidence  in  its  own  judgment.  It  is 
perfectly  convinced  that  the  decisions  it  has  reached 
about  the  merits  of  the  authors  of  the  past  supersede 
all  that  have  gone  before,  and  will  be  recognized  as 
binding  by  those  who  follow  after.  It  therefore  takes 
but  little  interest  in  the  attitude  of  previous  genera- 
tions, save  perhaps  to  wonder  at  their  folly,  to  point 
out  their  blunders,  and  to  indulge  as  a  consequence 
in  an  exalted  sense  and  patronizing  display  of  its  own 
superiority.  It  is  perhaps  inevitable  that  this  feeling 
should  prevail;  certainly  it  will  after  familiarizing 
one's  self  with  the  opinions  about  the  authors  which 


CRITICAL  LITERATURE  OF  THE  PERIOD     125 

held  sway  during  this  period  of  transition.  Were  we 
to  draw  general  conclusions  from  the  specific  data 
furnished  by  the  literary  organs  of  that  time,  we 
should  be  forced  to  take  the  ground  that  contemporary 
criticism,  at  least  of  works  of  the  imagination,  was 
the  most  untrustworthy  and  valueless  occupation  to 
which  the  human  mind  can  devote  itself.  Few  as  were 
then  the  successes  of  those  concerned  with  the  pro- 
duction of  creative  literature,  they  far  outnumber  the 
successes  of  those  who  sat  in  judgment  upon  them. 
It  is  not  that  the  works  which  are  now  never  heard  of 
were  then  eulogized  in  the  most  glowing  terms,  and 
works  which  the  world  cherishes  now  among  its  price- 
less possessions  were  either  cavalierly  dismissed,  or 
inadequately  noticed,  or  were  spoken  of  in  the  most 
depreciatory  terms.  This  is  characteristic  of  every 
period.  But  the  critics  of  that  day  professed  that  they 
were  looking  earnestly  for  successors  to  the  great 
writers  of  the  previous  period.  Yet  they  were  unable 
to  discover  the  rise  of  any  new  poetical  luminaries 
above  the  horizon.  The  trouble  with  them  was  that 
they  could  not  recognize  them  after  they  were  risen. 
There  is  a  curious  disagreement  between  the  conclu- 
sions reached  about  authors  and  their  works  by  the 
reviewers  of  that  time  and  the  conclusions  in  regard 
to  the  same  writers  and  writings  which  soon  came  to 
be  held  generally  by  cultivated  readers  and  continue 
to  be  so  held  to-day.  And  it  made  no  difference 
apparently  from  what  quarter  the  criticism  came. 
The  wisest  and  greatest  of  men  were  often  as  much 
subject  to  aberration  in  their  views,  were  as  much 


126  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

struck  by  judicial  blindness  as  the  obscurest  and  least 
esteemed. 

Let  us,  however,  be  just  to  the  critical  fraternity 
of  this  period  who  shared  in  certain  of  the  disadvan- 
tages of  critics  of  all  periods,  besides  having  some 
special  disabilities  of  their  own.  There  is  of  course 
the  personal  equation  which  leads  one  man  to  look 
with  indifference  upon  what  the  vast  majority  of  men 
passionately  admire.  But  far  greater  than  this  is  the 
difficulty  that  attends  him  who  is  compelled  to  give 
speedily  a  fair  and  just  judgment  of  a  work  which 
necessarily  requires  for  honest  appreciation  that 
thorough  familiarity  which  is  begot  of  frequent 
examination  and  of  examination  in  different  states 
of  mind.  This  is  true  of  every  single  poem  of  any 
length.  But  when  it  comes  to  a  collection  of  short 
poems,  the  task  of  judging  becomes  infinitely  harder. 
* '  There  is  no  forming  a  true  estimate, ' '  wrote  Words- 
worth, ''of  a  volume  of  small  poems  by  reading  them 
all  together ;  one  stands  in  the  way  of  the  other.  They 
must  either  be  read  a  few  at  once,  or  the  book  must 
remain  some  time  by  one,  before  a  judgment  can 
be  made  of  the  quantity  of  thought  and  feeling  and 
imagery  it  contains,  and  what  variety  of  moods  of 
mind  it  can  either  impart  or  is  suited  to."  This  is  a 
condition  of  things  that  must  always  confront  the 
critic  who  has  to  bring  out  his  notice  at  a  particular 
time,  or  under  the  urgency  of  early  demand.  No 
matter  how  diligent  and  open-minded  he  may  be,  he  is 
always  heavily  handicapped  by  the  inadequacy  of  his 
opportunity  to  gain  full  appreciation  of  what  he  has 


I 


CRITICAL  LITERATURE  OF  THE  PERIOD     127 

under  consideration.  Furthermore,  in  consequence  of 
the  haste  and  pressure  under  which  he  is  constantly 
compelled  to  form  and  express  opinions,  the  con- 
scientious re\iewer  is  inevitably  haunted  by  the  fear 
that  his  judgment  may  be  imposed  upon  by  something 
which  has  about  it  for  him  the  attraction  or  repulsion 
of  novelty,  either  in  its  matter  or  in  the  manner  of  its 
treatment.  This  may  lead  him  in  one  case  to  undue 
disparagement;  or  what  in  his  eyes  is  far  worse,  it 
may  induce  him  to  attribute  to  the  work  under  consid- 
eration an  excellence  which  cannot  stand  the  test  of 
close  familiarity.  The  cautious  critic  is  therefore 
inclined  to  express  himself  with  reserve,  if  not  with 
coolness,  even  when  most  favorably  disposed;  for  he 
feels  that  while  it  may  turn  out,  unfortunately  as 
regards  himself,  that  the  primrose  he  fancies  he  has 
chanced  to  meet  by  the  river's  brim,  may  be  a  good 
deal  more  than  a  primrose,  still  in  the  vast  majority 
of  instances  it  is  much  safer  for  him  to  treat  it  as  a 
primrose  and  nothing  more,  and  not  mistake  it  for 
a  giant  sequoia. 


CHAPTER  V 

THE   LITERARY   SITUATION   IN   THE   TRANSITION 

PERIOD 

Part  Two 
Surviving  Reputations  op  the  Georgian  Era 

By  1830  the  great  Georgian  era  had  reached  its 
close.  The  force  of  the  mighty  intellectual  outburst, 
which  had  lasted  for  a  third  of  a  century,  had  been 
spent.  The  men  who  had  set  it  in  motion  or  had 
carried  it  forward  had  largely  passed  away.  Those 
of  them  who  survived  no  longer  poured  forth  inspira- 
tion. There  was  an  interregnum,  not  infrequent  in 
literary  history,  between  the  spirit  that  had  gone  out 
and  the  spirit  that  was  to  come  in.  The  throne  of 
letters  was  vacant. 

The  greatest  of  the  younger  race  of  this  vanishing 
era  had  all  found  early  graves.  Keats  had  died  at 
the  age  of  twenty-five,  Shelley  at  the  age  of  thirty, 
Byron  at  the  age  of  thirty-six.  There  were  still  a 
number  alive  of  the  mightiest  of  the  older  generation, 
but  as  a  rule  their  creative  activity  had  ceased.  Scott 
was  already  entering  the  valley  of  the  shadow  of  death. 
Coleridge  was  moralizing  or  monologizing  in  the 
Gilman   villa   at   Highgate.     Wordsworth   was    now 


REPUTATIONS  OF  THE  GEORGIAN  ERA       129 

beginning  to  rejoice  in  the  fulness  of  his  fame;  but 
his  fame  was  based  upon  his  early  work,  and  was  not 
increased,  nor  was  it  to  be  increased  by  anything  he 
was  now  producing  or  destined  to  produce.  Of  the 
men  of  the  second  rank  Crabbe  was  approaching  four- 
score and  was  incapable  of  further  exertion.  Camp- 
bell, Hunt,  Landor,  Moore,  Rogers,  and  Southey  were 
to  live  longer,  some  of  them  much  longer;  but  their 
work  was  henceforth  mainly  confined  to  prose,  or  in 
most  cases  might  better  have  been  restricted  to  it  when 
it  was  not. 

To  take  the  place  of  those  who  were  gone,  or  who 
were  still  on  the  stage  but  with  their  work  accom- 
plished, there  were  no  men  of  promise  looming  up. 
So  assuredly  it  seemed  to  the  critics  of  that  time. 
They  scanned  the  horizon  near  and  far — at  least  they 
said  so — in  search  of  some  new  luminary;  but  in  no 
quarter  could  they  find  anything  to  reward  their  wist- 
ful gaze.  A  feeling  of  this  sort  continued  during  the 
whole  of  the  decade  from  1830  to  1840.  In  truth,  it 
largely  extended  down  to  1850.  Even  before  the 
earlier  date  it  had  manifested  its  existence.  ''Since 
the  death  of  Lord  Byron,"  wrote  Jeffrey  in  1828, 
''there  has  been  no  king  in  Israel;  and  none  of  his 
former  competitors  now  seem  inclined  to  push  their 
pretensions  to  the  vacant  throne.  Scott  and  Moore 
and  Southey  appear  to  have  nearly  renounced  verse, 
and  finally  taken  service  with  the  Muses  of  prose;— 
and  Crabbe  and  Coleridge  and  Wordsworth,  we  fear, 
are  burnt  out;— and  Campbell  and  Rogers  repose 
under  their  laurels,  and,  contented  each  with  his  own 


130  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

elegant  little  domain,  seem  but  little  disposed  either 
to  extend  its  boundaries,  or  to  add  new  provinces  to 
their  rule.'"  At  the  period  this  was  written,  there 
could  hardly  have  been  an  exacter  picture  of  the 
situation. 

Views  to  the  same  effect,  but  even  gloomier,  came 
a  few  years  later  from  the  leading  critic  of  'Black- 
wood's Magazine.'  ''All  the  great  schools  seem 
effete,"  said  Christopher  North.  .  .  .  "All  the  Sacred 
Band  have  done  their  best — their  all — but  on  the 
horizon  I  see  not  the  far-off  coming  light  of  the  fore- 
heads of  a  new  generation  of  poets.  That  dawn  will 
rise  over  our  graves — perhaps  not  till  the  forlorn  ^hic 
jacet'  on  our  tomb-stones  is  in  green  obliteration.  The 
era  has  been  glorious — that  includes  Cowper  and 
Wordsworth,  Burns  and  Byron.  From  what  region 
of  man's  spirit  shall  break  a  new  dayspring  of  Song? 
The  poetry  of  that  long  era  is  instinct  with  passion — 
and,  above  all,  with  the  love  of  nature.  I  know  not 
from  what  fresh  fountains  the  waters  may  now  flow-— 
nor  can  I  imagine  what  hand  may  unlock  them,  and 
lead  them  on  their  mazy  wanderings  over  the  still 
beautiful  flowers  and  herbage  of  the  dsedal  earth — 
the  world  of  sense  and  of  soul.  The  future  is  all 
darkness."^ 

Such  was  the  melancholy  view  of  the  situation  taken 
in  the  North.  From  the  South  came  the  same  wail 
of  woe.  No  matter  whether  the  review  reflected  Whig 
or  Tory  opinions  or  was  purely  literary,  a  similar 

1' Edinburgh  Eeview,'  September,  1828,  Vol.  XLVIII,  pp.  47-48. 
2'Noetes  Ambrosianae,'  'Blackwood's  Magazine,'  February,   1832. 


KEPUTATIONS  OF  THE  GEOKGIAN  ERA       131 

doleful  commentary  is  to  be  found.  In  1834  '  The  New 
Monthly  Magazine'  assured  us  that  the  condition  of 
literature  seemed  anything  but  progressive.  "In  the 
department  of  poetry,"  it  said,  "we  have  had  nothing 
for  several  years  worth  mentioning.  A  desultory 
effusion  now  and  then  finds  its  way  into  the  periodical 
journals,  as  if  to  show  that  the  fire  of  genius  is  not  as 
yet  wholly  extinct  amongst  us.  But  no  poem  of  any 
length  or  character  has  lately  seen  the  light  in  this 
country.'"  Again  and  again  spoke  to  the  same  effect 
the  Tory  organ,  'Fraser's  Magazine.'  In  1834  in  a 
review  of  'The  Poets  of  the  Day,'  the  critic  summed 
up  briefly  his  estimate  by  declaring  it  to  be  "sad 
work."  "We  recollect,"  the  writer  went  on  to  say, 
"who  were  they  who  once  in  our  time  gave  us  some- 
thing worth  reading,  and  we  sorrowfully  look  for  them 
or  their  like  in  vain.  Has  our  poetry  departed  from 
us ;  and  are  we  sunk  to  an  age  of  criticism — an  age 
which  never  affords  anything  worthy  of  being  criti- 
cised?" "One  by  one,"  he  said  on  another  occasion, 
"these  'mighty  masters'  have  fallen  asleep,  or  ceased 
to  touch  their  deep-toned  lyres."  The  prospect  was 
dismal.  "No  sun,  no  moon,"  he  added,  "no  stars  in 
their  poetical  heavens — nothing  but  a  miserable 
sprinkling  of  wretched  glow-worms."  A  ray  of  light, 
however,  came  to  cheer  this  despondent  soul.  He  had 
discovered  in  one  of  the  contributors  to  the  magazine 
a  writer  who  was  to  redeem  the  period.  He  had 
written  "one  of  the  noblest  poems  \^^.th  which  modem 
genius  has  enriched  our  language  and  nation — perhaps 

1  AprU,  1834,  Vol.  XL,  p.  498, 


132  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

the  noblest  poem  since  the  days  of  Milton. '  '^  This  was 
an  epic  entitled  '  The  Judgment  of  the  Flood. '  Modern 
men  have  largely  forgotten  not  merely  the  existence 
of  this  great  work,  but  even  the  name  of  him  who 
wrote  it.  Its  author  was  John  Abraham  Heraud,  who 
in  course  of  time  subsided  from  the  position  of  suc- 
cessor to  Milton  in  order  to  become  a  subordinate 
editor  of  a  London  periodical.  But  even  a  temporary 
ray  of  hope  from  that  quarter  was  insufficient  to 
alleviate  the  sorrows  of  the  then  leading  critical 
weekly,  'The  Literary  Gazette.'  Much  to  the  wrath 
of  its  monthly  contemporary,  it  refused  to  find  in 
Heraud  the  coming  literary  regenerator  of  the  race. 
Its  \dew  in  consequence  was  altogether  despondent. 
**We  neither  lack  poetry,"  it  said,  *'nor  the  taste  for 
poetry,  but  we  lack  poets." 

Let  it  not  be  fancied  that  these  are  merely  scattered 
expressions  of  individual  opinion  laboriously  extracted 
from  the  critical  literature  of  the  period.  Sentiments 
of  a  precisely  similar  character  can  be  found  every- 
where in  the  reviews  of  the  day — indeed,  it  is  safe  to 
say  in  every  article  that  dealt  directly  or  indirectly 
with  works  which  are  designed  to  appeal  to  the  reader 
for  beauty  of  style  or  for  expression  of  intense  feeling. 
There  was  a  universal  lament  that  literature  in  its 
higher  forms  met  with  but  slight  encouragement;  in 
poetry,  its  highest  form,  it  met  with  none  at  all.  Pub- 
lishers were  chary  about  bringing  out  volumes  of 
verse  by  unknown  men.  They  complained  too  that 
the  productions  of  men  already  well  and  widely  known 

1  Vol.  IX,  p.  534,  May,  3834. 


EEPUTATIONS  OF  THE  GEORGIAN  ERA      133 

did  not  pay  their  expenses.  ' '  Sufficient  for  our  day  is 
the  mediocrity  thereof, ' '  said  in  1832  the  same  critical 
weekly  already  cited.  ''There  is  no  encouragement 
for  higher  efforts.  Literature  has  become  a  mere 
traffic,  and  Shakespeare  and  Milton  as  a  property  at 
three  and  a  half  per  cent  would  be  rejected  for  Tomp- 
kins and  Jenkins  at  four."  This  was  the  voice  of  the 
Aveeklies.  The  quarterlies  were  just  as  pronounced  in 
their  opinion.  In  an  article  on  Taylor's  'Philip  Van 
Artevelde,'  'The  Edinburgh  Review'  characterized 
the  time  as  "  a  period  of  marked  indifference  to  poeti- 
cal productions."^  The  same  attitude  was  taken  by 
the  monthlies.  "Many  a  well-educated  man,"  said 
'Eraser's  Magazine,'  "can  no  more  read  poetry  than 
he  can  Chinese.  The  neglect,  not  to  say  contempt,  of 
the  muses,  now  in  fashion,  bids  fair  to  render  this 
Parnassian  illiteracy  universal. '  '^  These  are  no  single 
utterances;  they  are  selected  from  a  large  number 
which  can  be  found  scattered  through  the  periodicals 
of  the  period.  There  was  assuredly  so  much  justifica- 
tion for  the  gloomy  views  here  expressed  of  the 
literary  situation  that  from  1830  to  1842  not  a  single 
volume  of  poetry  which  has  continued  to  survive  paid 
then  the  expenses  of  its  publication.  Ten  to  twenty 
years  before  the  former  date,  verse,  at  least  the  verse 
of  great  authors,  was  as  a  rule  more  salable  than  prose. 
The  disposition  in  consequence  was  not  unnatural  to 
dwell  upon  the  glories  of  the  period  which  had  just 
gone  by,   and  to   contrast  mth  them  the   mournful 

1 'Edinburgh  Eeview,'  October,  1834. 
2  '  Fraser  's  Magazine, '  December,  1834. 


134  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

realities  of  the  present.  Those  times  are  past,  said 
as  late  as  1839  a  writer  in  'The  Edinburgh  Review/ 
*'and  no  visible  tokens  seem  to  announce  their  return. 
Even  while  many  of  our  best  poets  are  yet  alive, 
poetry  herself  is  dead  or  entranced."^ 

It  is  not  necessary  indeed  to  limit  this  despairing 
sort  of  utterance  to  the  period  in  question.  It  occurs 
in  English  literature  at  intermittent  intervals.  Pretty 
certainly  it  has  recurred  in  all  literature  since  the 
inscription  of  hieroglyphics  on  Egyptian  monuments. 
Of  the  little  estimation  in  which  poetry  was  held  in 
England  at  this  particular  time,  as  compared  with 
prose,  there  can  be  however  no  question.  It  was  the 
view  taken  by  writers  generally,  whether  critical  or 
creative,  during  the  twenty  years  which  followed  the 
death  of  Byron.  The  fact  of  the  unpopularity  of 
poetry  was  generally  conceded ;  the  reasons  given  for 
the  fact  ranged  all  the  way  from  the  non-existence  of 
dictators  to  the  levelling  influences  caused  by  the 
spread  of  democracy.  Authority  for  all  sorts  of 
different  and  differing  ^dews  can  be  found  on  every 
side.  It  may  not  be  fair  to  cite  Wordsworth,  for  he 
had  not  much  respect  for  any  of  the  poetry  produced 
in  the  previous  era  except  his  own.  During  its  most 
brilliant  period,  had  it  not  been  for  himself,  he  would 
have  been  discouraged  by  the  outlook.  Naturally  he 
was  much  more  despondent  in  these  latter  days.  One 
of  his  visitors  observed  to  him  in  1833  that  amidst  the 
great  political  agitations  of  the  times  through  which 
they  had  been  passing,  poetry  seemed  to  have  died  out 

1  Vol.  LXVIII,  p.  335. 


REPUTATIONS  OF  THE  GEORGIAN  ERA       135 

entirely.  Wordsworth  admitted  that  this  was  true  but 
insisted  that  it  was  not  the  only  cause.  There  had 
been,  he  said,  an  overproduction,  and  in  consequence 
a  surfeit.^ 

As  already  intimated,  many  and  varied  were  the 
reasons  then  given  for  the  general  decay  of  interest 
in  poetry.  A  common  one  was  the  blight  of  democracy. 
This  from  its  very  nature  was  asserted  to  be  deadly 
to  literature  and  the  arts.  One  of  its  consequences 
was  that  poetry  received  no  longer  patronage  from 
men  of  rank.  Another  reason  given  was  the  growth 
of  the  utilitarian  spirit.  Still  another  was  the  wide 
and  constantly  increasing  interest  in  novels  and  their 
consequent  prevalence.  But  of  the  many  different 
explanations  constantly  brought  forward  two  stand 
out  prominently.  One  is  general,  the  other  specific. 
There  were  those  who  attributed  the  conceded  lack 
of  interest  in  poetry  to  the  astounding  progress  of 
scientific  investigation  and  the  wonders  it  had  accom- 
plished. The  extraordinary  physical  discoveries  of 
later  years,  it  was  asserted,  by  throwing  further  and 
further  back  the  boundaries  of  the  world  of  practical 
science,  and  realizing  its  most  visionary  conceptions, 
had  rendered  cheap  and  vulgar  the  wonders  of  the 
imagination.  The  days  of  romance  had  in  consequence 
gone  by.  Nothing  was  to  be  looked  forward  to  but  the 
reign  of  utility.  The  achievements  of  science,  it  was 
maintained,  tended  to  substitute  interest  in  the  marvels 
it  performed  for  the  interest  which  had  once  belonged 
to  the  creations  of  the  mind.    Such  a  theory,  it  is  clear, 

iW.  Knight's  'Life  of  Wordsworth,'  Vol,  III,  p.  238. 


136  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

presaged,  if  true,  the  utter  ruin  which  was  eventually 
to  overtake  all  literature. 

For  those  who  were  not  disposed  to  accept  as  a 
satisfactory  explanation  this  dismal  view,  there  was 
for  the  earlier  part  of  tliis  period  what  has  already 
been  suggested  as  a  reason  frequently  advanced  for 
the  decline  of  poetic  production  and  for  the  disregard 
of  it  when  produced.  Exciting  political  questions  had 
loomed  up  into  a  prominence  they  had  never  held 
before.  They  took  not  merely  the  first  but  an  almost 
exclusive  place  in  the  minds  of  men.  In  the  early  part 
of  the  period  under  discussion,  interest  in  them  had 
been  intensified  by  the  excitement  of  the  July  days 
in  Paris,  where  less  than  a  week  had  sufficed  to  crumble 
into  dust  the  laborious  masonry  of  the  Holy  Alliance, 
and  to  fill  Europe  ^vith  unrest,  and  with  doubt  as  to 
what  the  future  had  in  store.  This  had  been  followed 
in  England  by  the  reform  agitation,  whose  approach 
had  been  felt  before  even  its  outlines  could  be  detected 
in  visible  shape,  and  whose  presence,  when  it  actually 
came,  engrossed  the  thoughts  of  men  and  stirred  their 
hearts  with  alternate  hopes  and  fears.  Against  the 
all-absorbing  interest  in  questions  which  involved  the 
happiness  of  the  individual  and  of  the  race,  how  could 
poetry  hope  to  maintain  itself?  But  when  the  same 
indifference  continued  to  be  manifested  after  the 
storm  had  passed  away,  and  men  had  fallen  into  their 
old  routine,  nothing  was  left  the  believers  in  this 
particular  cause  but  the  conviction  expressed  by 
Wordsworth  that  there  had  been  an  overproduction 
and  the  consequent  surfeit  had  cloyed  the  appetite. 


REPUTATIONS  OF  THE  GEORGIAN  ERA       137 

Again  and  again  was  tlie  remark  repeated  that  scores 
and  even  hundreds  of  books  existed  in  manuscript  that 
would  do  honor  to  the  country  and  the  age,  but  for 
which  publication  could  not  be  secured. 

Observations  of  this  sort  have  been  given,  not 
because  of  their  truth,  but  of  their  prevalence.  They 
are  the  very  same  which  are  heard  during  every 
literary  interregnum  when  the  old  poetic  spirit  has 
been  worn  out  and  the  new  has  not  yet  embodied  itself, 
or  at  least  has  not  yet  become  distinctly  recognizable. 
It  may  be  indeed  that  after  a  period  of  great  intel- 
lectual fertility  the  human  mind  actually  needs  and 
demands  a  season  in  which  to  lie  fallow  in  order  to 
recruit  its  exhausted  energies.  Even  if  production 
continues,  it  is  apt  to  be  of  a  different  character,  as 
if  the  principle  of  the  rotation  of  crops  were  as  true 
applied  to  the  brain  as  it  is  to  the  soil.  Nor  will  the 
correctness  of  such  an  inference  be  seriously  impaired 
because  some  sporadic  and  shining  example  of  vigorous 
growth  shoots  up  in  contrast  to  the  general  barren- 
ness. But  whether  the  theory  be  well  founded  or  not, 
there  is  no  question  as  to  the  prevalence  at  this  time 
of  those  dolorous  forecasts  about  the  future  of  litera- 
ture, especially  of  the  highest  form  of  it,  which 
regularly  follow  the  subsidence  of  every  period  of 
great  creative  activity.  The  old  utterances  again 
recur  in  almost  the  same  words.  There  is  no  outlook 
for  the  continuance  of  poetry,  we  are  told;  no  hope 
for  its  proper  appreciation.  If  offered,  it  will  not  be 
published;  if  published,  it  cannot  be  sold.  This  may 
be  true  on  a  small  scale.    But  the  valuable  works  which 


138  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

continue  to  exist  in  manuscript  form  a  body  of  litera- 
ture, about  the  greatness  of  which  the  mind  grows 
increasing  skeptical  with  advancing  years. 

There  seems  also  to  have  been  during  the  period 
under  discussion  a  general  agreement  on  the  part  of 
the  critics  that  the  condition  of  things  just  depicted 
was  entirely  the  fault  of  the  readers  and  not  at  all 
that  of  the  writers.  It  apparently  did  not  occur  to 
any  one  of  those  complaining  of  the  indifference  of  the 
public,  that  the  public  had  a  right  to  be  indifferent; 
that  the  reason  it  did  not  read  the  new  works  of  the 
old  masters  was  largely  because  they  were  not  worth 
reading.  In  truth,  it  may  in  some  slight  measure 
reconcile  us  to  the  early  death  of  Keats  and  Shelley 
and  Byron  when  we  consider  how  little  of  value  was 
produced  by  any  of  their  great  contemporaries  after 
reaching  the  age  the  most  long-lived  of  these  three 
attained.  The  reputation  of  their  survivors  rests 
mainly  upon  what  they  did,  either  in  youth  or  before 
youth  had  fully  passed  away.  Not  that  occasional 
sparks  of  inspiration  did  not  flash  forth  afterward; 
but  in  the  case  of  most,  the  poetic  fire  had  almost 
wholly  abated  or  vanished  entirely.  The  history  of 
the  great  authors  of  the  older  Georgian  generation 
who,  though  advancing  towards  later  life,  were  still, 
in  1830,  in  the  full  possession  of  intellectual  force, 
bears  extraordinary  testimony  to  the  truth  already 
stated  that  great  poetic  performance  belongs  usually 
to  the  period  of  comparative  youth.  They  produced 
but  little ;  and  the  little  they  produced  was  in  general 
worth  little. 


REPUTATIONS  OF  THE  GEORGIAN  ERA      139 

There  were  still  several  members  of  the  older 
generation  that  were  more  or  less  actively  engaged 
in  literary  production  in  1830,  and  in  the  decade  or 
decades  following.  They  all  continued  to  occupy  a 
high  position  in  the  eyes  of  the  public.  Those  of  them 
who  at  that  period  were  most  conspicuous  were  Moore, 
Campbell,  Wordsworth,  and  Southey,  to  whom  is  to 
be  added  for  the  brief  time  he  lived,  Coleridge.  There 
was  another  group  that  ranked  then  lower  in  the 
general  estimation,  though  each  of  them  had  a  body 
of  admirers  and  followers  of  his  own,  who  rated  him 
in  some  cases  higher  than  most  of  those  just  mentioned. 
The  members  of  this  second  group  were  Landor, 
Leigh  Hunt,  and  Rogers.  It  can  be  said  justly  of  the 
five  mentioned  of  the  first  group,  that  whatever  poetic 
reputation  they  had  achieved,  they  had  achieved  long 
before.  They  were  not  to  add  to  it  by  anything  they 
produced  after.  In  the  case  of  Moore  the  decline  of 
production  was  due  rather  to  the  distraction  of  other 
pursuits  than  to  any  actual  failure  of  such  ability  as 
he  possessed.  Still  in  a  general  way  his  career  bears 
out  the  truth  of  the  proposition  that  the  work  which 
made  the  men  of  the  elder  generation  famous  was  the 
work  of  the  first  half  of  their  lives.  Moore  did  not 
die  till  1852.  His  'Lalla  Rookh'  was  brought  out  in 
1817  when  he  was  thirty-eight  years  old.  The  poetry 
he  produced  after  that  date  is  now  so  little  read  that 
it  can  hardly  be  said  to  enjoy  that  quasi-distinction 
which  consists  in  being  read  about. 

Much  more  marked,  however,  in  this  respect  was 
the  case  of  Campbell,  who  was  still  a  prominent  lit- 


140  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

erary  figure  in  1830,  and  did  not  die  until  1844.  During 
the  period  between  these  years  he  was  living  largely 
upon  his  past  reputation;  so  far  as  posterity  is  con- 
cerned, he  was  living  entirely  upon  it.  He  was  in 
1830,  and  had  been  for  some  time  before,  the  editor 
of  'The  New  Monthly  Magazine';  but  to  the  fortunes 
of  that  periodical  he  contributed  nothing  but  his  name. 
The  mts  of  'Blackwood'  used  to  declare  that  every 
month  the  reader  was  allured  by  the  pleasures  of  hope, 
but  it  invariably  ended  for  him  in  the  pains  of 
possession.  The  truth  about  him  was  voiced  by 
'Eraser's  Magazine'  with  all  the  brutality  of  its  early 
utterance.  It  expressed  regret  that  he  did  not  die 
after  the  publication  of  'Gertrude  of  Wyoming.' 
"Had  he  had  such  good  fortune,"  it  said,  "we  should 
have  had  the  imaginations  of  the  whole  world  in  his 
favour,  fancying  what  he  ynight  have  done,  had  he 
lived,  to  enhance  to  extravagance  the  value  of  what 
he  had  then  done."^  In  truth,  a  good  deal  of  Camp- 
bell's later  life  was,  what  he  once  incidentally  called 
a  portion  of  it,  "serious  idleness."  The  works  by 
which  his  name  survives  belong  almost  exclusively 
to  the  period  of  his  youth.  He  was  born  in  1777.  At 
the  age  of  twenty-two  he  sprang  at  once  into  fame 
with  the  publication  of  'The  Pleasures  of  Hope.' 
Between  1799,  the  year  in  which  that  poem  appeared, 
and  1810,  when  'O'Connor's  Child'  came  out,  nearly 
all  of  the  poetry,  upon  which  his  fame  is  based,  was 
produced.  Two  or  three  short  pieces  are  at  most  all 
that  is  much  read  now  of  the  works  he  composed  during 

1  'Fraser's  MagaziBe,'  June,  1830,  Vol.  I,  p.  563. 


REPUTATIONS  OF  THE  GEORGIAN  ERA      141 

the  more  than  thirty  years  which  made  up  the  rest  of 
his  life.  It  was  a  sort  of  carpentering  at  literature 
in  which  he  henceforth  engaged.  He  wrote  criticism; 
he  wrote  history;  he  wrote  travels;  he  wrote  biog- 
raphy; he  edited  magazines;  but  he  produced  no  great 
creative  work.  In  his  case  the  soil  was  in  a  certain 
way  rich,  but  it  was  also  very  thin.  The  growth  of  one 
crop  exhausted  it.  This  cannot  be  said  of  Coleridge 
now  drawing  towards  the  grave ;  yet  in  this  particular 
there  was  a  marked  similarity  in  the  lives  of  the  two 
men.  Coleridge  was  born  in  1772,  and  his  career  as 
a  producer  of  poetry,  which  is  now  read  and  studied, 
may  be  said  to  have  ended  in  1802;  for  though  some 
of  his  finest  pieces,  as  for  instance,  'Kubla  Khan'  and 
'Christabel,'  were  published  many  years  after  the 
latter  date,  they  had  been  written  many  years  before 
they  appeared  in  print. 

In  1830  the  position  of  Wordsworth  at  the  head  of 
living  English  poets  was  generally  recognized,  though 
in  some  quarters  the  old  prejudice  survived.  Still,  he 
had  now  reached  that  degree  of  popularity  that  every 
new  work  he  put  forth  was  hailed  by  the  entire  critical 
press  with  respectful  approval  if  not  with  enthusiastic 
commendation.  Yet  it  is  as  true  of  him  as  it  is  of  the 
others  that  he  had  long  ceased  to  produce  anything 
by  which  he  is  now  generally  known  and  admired. 
What  is  greatest  in  his  production  belongs  to  the 
period  of  youth.  Matthew  Arnold  was  one  of  the  most 
thoroughgoing  of  his  partisans.  He  was  mlling  to 
rank  him  just  below  Milton,  and  with  true  British 
insularity  placed  him,  with  the  exception  of  Goethe, 


142  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

above  all  the  writers  of  the  Continent  after  the  death 
of  Moliere.  Yet  he  insists  that  it  was  between  1798 
and  1808  that  Wordsworth  not  only  produced  nearly 
everything  by  which  he  is  now  remembered,  but  nearly 
everything  which  is  worthy  of  remembrance.  This 
must  be  regarded  as  a  pretty  extravagant  way  of 
putting  things ;  yet,  when  we  take  into  account  certain 
poems  which  appeared  in  the  edition  of  1815,  it  is  to 
be  conceded  that  the  larger  part  of  his  best  work  was 
produced  within  the  limits  Arnold  set. 

One  exception  there  was  at  the  opening  of  the  fourth 
decade  of  the  century  to  the  general  indifference 
which  was  manifested  towards  poetry  and  poets. 
This  was  furnished  by  Lord  Byron.  Against  his  all- 
conquering  personality  the  partisans  of  other  authors 
had  made  little  headway  during  his  life.  The  circum- 
stances of  his  death  had  tended  to  retard  the  approach 
of  that  depreciatory  estimate  which  is  fairly  certain 
to  overtake,  for  a  time  at  least,  any  exceedingly  popular 
writer,  when  once  the  ascendency  and  sway  exercised 
by  his  living  presence  have  been  withdrawn.  Conse- 
quently, though  Byron  had  been  dead  several  years, 
his  influence  still  dominated  literature.  It  long  con- 
tinued to  prevail  over  that  of  the  greatest  of  the 
contemporaries  who  survived  him.  In  his  case,  too, 
if  interest  in  him  and  his  fortunes  had  at  all  begun  to 
wane,  it  was  revived  at  this  very  time  by  the  publica- 
tion of  his  letters  accompanied  by  Moore's  biography, 
which  brought  again  vividly  before  the  public  the 
incidents  of  his  stormy  and  checkered  career. 

Few  at  the  present  day  have  the  slightest  conception 


REPUTATIONS  OF  THE  GEORGIAN  ERA       143 

of  the  profound  sensation  which  the  death  of  Byron 
created  in  the  whole  of  Europe.  He  was  still  young. 
He  had  barely  passed  the  middle  point  of  man's 
allotted  life  upon  earth.  About  him  there  had  been 
from  the  outset  the  fascination  of  brilliant  personal 
achievement.  What  he  did  had  in  one  way  kept  all 
Europe  in  a  state  of  astonishment  and  awe;  as  in 
another  way  and  in  another  sphere  had  been  effected 
by  Napoleon.  There  was  time  enough  for  him  to 
accomplish  much  more.  No  one  could  imagine  what 
new  literary  enterprises  he  might  undertake,  what 
new  conquests  he  might  achieve,  when  he  suddenly 
passed  away.  The  element  of  unexpectedness  was 
reinforced  by  the  circumstances  under  which  he  died. 
To  the  interest  felt  in  him  as  a  poet  had  been  added 
the  interest  of  chivalric  adventure.  He  himself  had 
always  been  in  fullest  intellectual  sympathy  mth  the 
party  of  progress.  By  the  liberals  of  the  Continent 
he  was  regarded  as  one  of  their  leaders.  The  same 
position  he  had  held  while  resident  in  England.  No 
one  who  familiarizes  himself  with  the  newspapers  of 
the  time  can  fail  to  note  that  much  of  the  personal 
hostility  that  beset  Byron  after  the  separation  from 
his  wife,  and  that  followed  him  in  Ms  retreat  from  his 
native  land,  had  been  due  to  the  character  of  his 
political  opinions  and  utterances,  which  were  pecu- 
liarly offensive  to  the  Tory  party  then  in  the  first  flush 
of  its  triumph  over  Napoleon.  The  closing  acts  of  his 
career  had  been  in  fullest  harmony  with  the  sentiments 
he  professed.  He  had  fallen  while  sharing  in  the 
struggle  of  a  race  to  regain  its  lost  liberties.     The 


144  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

cause  for  which  he  gave  up  his  life  had  for  nearly  a 
century  enlisted  the  active  interest  of  the  whole 
educated  class  in  Christendom.  It  now  received  a 
double  consecration.  To  it  the  most  brilliant  poet  of 
the  century  had  fallen  a  martyr  in  the  prime  of  life. 

It  was  inevitable  therefore  that  the  news  of  his 
sudden  death  should  have  come  upon  all  Europe  mth 
a  sense  of  shock.  But  if  the  sensation  produced  by  it 
in  other  countries  was  great,  it  naturally  reached  its 
culmination  in  his  own.  He  had  been  driven  from  it 
by  unreasoning  clamor.  Yet  his  fame  and  influence 
grew  with  the  distance  which  separated  him  from  his 
native  land,  and  mth  the  time  which  elapsed  ^dthout 
his  revisiting  it.  He  in  turn  had  disowned  it,  he  had 
unceasingly  satirized  it.  Yet  there  can  be  little 
question  that  he  gave  expression  to  the  deepest  feel- 
ings of  his  heart,  when,  after  declaring  that  it  was 
possible  for  a  man  to  make  for  himself  anywhere  a 
country,  he  went  on  to  say: 

Yet  I  was  born  where  men  are  proud  to  be, 
Not  without  cause ;  and  should  I  leave  behind 
The  inviolate  island  of  the  sage  and  free, 
And  seek  me  out  a  home  by  a  remoter  sea, 

Perchance  I  loved  it  well ;  and  if  I  lay 

My  ashes  in  a  soil  which  is  not  mine, 

My  spirit  shall  resume  it — if  we  may 

Unbodied  choose  a  sanctuary.    I  twine 

My  hopes  of  being  remembered  in  my  line 

"With  my  land 's  language :  if  too  fond  and  far 

These  aspirations  in  their  scope  incline, — 

If  my  fame  should  be,  as  my  fortunes  are. 

Of  hasty  growth  and  blight,  and  dull  Oblivion  bar 


REPUTATIONS  OF  THE  GEORGIAN  ERA       145 

My  name  from  out  the  temple  where  the  dead 
Are  honored  by  the  nations — let  it  be — 
And  light  the  laurels  on  a  loftier  head ! 
And  be  the  Spartan's  epitaph  on  me, 
'Sparta  hath  many  a  worthier  son  than  he.' 

In  England  where  nearly  the  whole  body  of  the 
younger  men  of  letters  recognized  Byron  as  their  liege 
lord,  the  excitement  caused  by  his  death  was  unprece- 
dented. There  is  plenty  of  evidence  as  to  the  existence 
of  the  impression  created  by  it  which  can  be  found 
stated  not  merely  in  general  terms,  but  given  as  the 
expression  of  individual  feeling.  Hazlitt  in  an  article 
in  'The  Edinburgh  Review'  for  July,  1824,  had  spoken 
of  the  death  of  Shelley  and  of  Keats.  ''To  this  band 
of  immortals,"  he  continued,  "a  third  has  since  been 
added — a  mightier  genius,  a  haughtier  spirit,  whose 
stubborn  impatience  and  Achilles-like  pride  only  death 
could  quell.  Greece,  Italy,  the  world  have  lost  their 
poet-hero;  and  his  death  has  spread  a  wider  gloom, 
and  been  recorded  with  a  deeper  awe  than  has  waited 
on  the  obsequies  of  the  many  great  who  have  died  in 
our  remembrance.  Even  detraction  has  been  silent 
at  his  tomb;  and  the  more  generous  of  his  enemies 
have  fallen  into  the  ranks  of  his  mourners."  The 
description  which  Tennyson  gave  of  his  own  state  of 
mind  when  he  heard  of  the  poet's  death  has  already 
been  recorded. 

Yet  the  enthusiastic  worship  of  the  boy  pales  before 
the  avowal  of  her  early  feelings  by  the  delicate  and 
spiritual  Mrs.  Browning,  while  still  Miss  Barrett. 
She  was  an  ardent  but  by  no  means  indiscriminating 


146  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

admirer  of  Wordsworth.  About  him  she  had  many- 
controversies  with  her  old  friend  and  instructor,  Hugh 
Stuart  Boyd,  who  continued  to  retain  at  a  later  period 
the  prejudices  against  that  poet  which  had  been 
prevalent  in  his  youth.  He  admitted,  however,  on  one 
occasion  that  she  was  liberal  in  conceding  the  merit 
of  Byron's  poetry.  She  resented  the  remark  warmly. 
She  would  not  be  praised  for  acknowledging  the 
excellence  of  works  which  she  had  always  admired  and 
loved,  and  always  expected  to  admire  and  love.  '  *  Why, 
when  I  was  a  little  girl," — this  was  said  in  1842 — '*I 
used  to  think  seriously  of  dressing  up  like  a  boy  and 
running  away  to  be  Lord  Byron's  page."^  This  would 
not  have  been  hard  to  conceive  in  the  case  of  some 
women ;  but  it  is  extraordinary  in  the  view  it  gives  of 
Bj^ron's  hold  upon  the  public  when  it  comes  from  the 
lips  of  a  woman  like  Mrs.  Browning. 

Feelings  of  this  kind  could  not  continue.  The 
history  of  literature  shows  nothing  more  distinctly 
than  the  rise  and  fall  of  reputations,  or  perhajjs  it 
would  be  more  correct  to  say,  their  oscillations  from 
highest  popularity  to  comparative  neglect.  This  is  not 
to  say  that  any  great  poet  is  ever  forgotten,  even  for 
a  time,  or  that  he  ever  fails  to  have  somewhere  a  body 
of  admirers  and  partisans ;  only  that  there  are  certain 
periods  when  he  occupies  in  the  estimate  of  the  great 
body  of  men  a  loftier  position  than  he  does  at  others. 
There  are  apt  to  be  particular  stages  in  the  mental 
growth  of  an  individual  when  he  falls  almost  com- 

1  Letter  to  H.  S.  Boyd  of  December  4,  1842,  in  'Letters  of  E.  B. 
Browning,'  Vol.  I,  p.  115, 


REPUTATIONS  OF  THE  GEORGIAN  ERA       147 

pletely  under  the  influence  of  some  special  writer. 
He  admires  him,  he  celebrates  him,  he  vaunts  his 
superiority  to  others ;  if  he  himself  writes,  he  is  fairly 
certain  to  imitate  him.  But  such  states  of  mind  are 
never  likely  to  be  permanent.  The  disciple  may 
always  continue  to  entertain  regard  for  the  man  he 
once  worshipped;  but  that  exclusive  regard  which  he 
felt  gives  way  to  a  less  enthusiastic  and  absorbing 
feeling.  The  truth  is  that  there  are  poets  suited  to 
different  periods  in  the  lives  of  each  of  us,  just  as 
there  are  poets  suited  to  the  different  tastes  and 
temperaments  of  all  of  us. 

What  is  true  of  the  individual  is  true  of  a  whole 
people.  A  great  writer  will  make  himself  the  special 
mouthpiece  of  a  generation.  To  its  hopes  and  fears, 
its  aspirations,  its  vague  longings,  he  will  give  their 
clearest  and  fullest  expression.  But  when  that  par- 
ticular mood  is  passed — as  in  time  it  is  destined  to 
pass — he  is  certain  to  lose  all  that  element  of  popu- 
larity which  depends  upon  community  of  feeling  and 
of  sentiment.  He  must  thenceforth  depend  upon  the 
general  power  he  has  displayed,  independent  of  the 
circumstances  and  the  times  which  have  given  to  his 
writings  special  vogue.  In  that  he  is  sure  to  have 
rivals ;  it  is  possible  that  he  may  have  superiors.  The 
revolutions  of  time  and  taste  may  bring,  and  in  some 
cases  are  fairly  sure  to  bring,  him  for  a  season  some- 
thing of  his  old  vogue ;  though  it  can  hardly  hope  to 
make  his  influence  a  second  time  overwhelmingly 
predominant.  x\ccordingly  we  can  always  rely  upon 
the  occasional  recurrence  of  modified  Byronic  revivals. 


148  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

There  are  certain  qualities  in  that  poet  which  tend  to 
make  him  a  power  among  men,  and  at  particular 
periods  a  great  power.  There  are  elements  in  his 
work  wherein  he  scarcely  finds  a  competitor.  He 
brought  to  English  literature  a  force  and  fire  to  which 
it  had  hitherto  been  a  stranger;  and  beside  the  head- 
long impetuosity  and  tumultuous  energy  of  his  verse, 
the  most  strenuous  efforts  of  other  men  seem  often 
as  tame  and  inadequate  as  the  jets  of  water  spouting 
from  a  fountain  in  a  pleasure  ground,  compared  with 
the  rush  and  roar  of  a  mighty  mountain  torrent 
plunging  down  to  the  valley  from  the  regions  of 
eternal  snow. 

By  1830  the  fame  of  Byron  was  just  beginning  to 
feel  the  influence  of  the  change  in  popular  taste.  It 
still  remained  paramount  indeed.  It  affected  all 
classes  and  all  grades  of  intellect.  Men  had  come 
under  it,  and  were  continuing  to  come  under  it,  who 
by  the  very  bent  of  their  minds  were  utterly  unfitted 
to  fall  under  its  sway;  who  belonged  not  merely  to 
another  party  but  to  a  hostile  party.  Taylor,  for 
instance,  the  author  of  'Philip  Van  Artevelde,'  was 
one  of  those  persons  whom  nature  designed  for  a 
Wordsworthian  pure  and  simple.  Yet  he  tells  us  that 
in  his  youth  he  was  an  enthusiastic  admirer  of  Byron. 
Nay,  more,  he  has  carefully  preserved  for  us  and 
published  a  copy  of  a  little  Byronic  poem,  the  sole 
survivor  of  a  number  of  others  of  the  same  sort.  The 
best  of  this  poetry  he  produced  was  not  bad  in  its 
kind,  he  assures  us;  not  indeed  without  a  certain  sort 
of  fervor  and  beauty.     Still,  the  specimen  which  was 


REPUTATIONS  OF  THE  GEORGIAN  ERA       149 

saved  from  the  general  wreck,  though  viewed  with  a 
good  deal  of  fondness,  and  even  pride  by  its  author, 
is  not  such  as  to  cause  deep  regret  that  the  others, 
formed  upon  the  same  model,  have  perished.  This 
early  admiration  of  Byron  came  to  be  considered  by 
Taylor  morally  stultif}ing;  not  in  the  sense  that  it 
was  debasing,  but  because  it  supplanted  for  the  time 
a  more  elevating  admiration,  which  of  course  from  his 
point  of  view  was  that  of  Wordsworth. 

These  last  words  of  Taylor  are  worthy  of  attention 
because  they  indicate  the  hostile  attitude  which  was 
soon  to  be  assumed  towards  Byron  by  large  numbers. 
In  1830  he  still  remained  the  most  potent  force  in 
literature.  He  was  still  the  one  whom  nearly  every 
youthful  aspirant  for  poetic  honors  took  consciously 
or  unconsciously  as  his  model.  The  adherents  of  other 
claimants  to  the  throne  of  letters  naturally  felt  called 
upon  to  denounce  his  pretensions,  and  in  some  cases 
to  insist  that  he  had  no  claim  to  the  title  of  monarch 
at  all.  It  ought  not  to  be  necessary — though  it  seems 
to  be  necessary — to  say  that  it  is  as  legitimate,  as  it 
is  common,  for  any  reader  to  feel  and  express  the 
preference  he  entertains  for  one  great  author  as  com- 
pared ^vith  another.  It  implies  notliing  either  for  or 
against  the  degree  of  his  intellectual  development. 
The  message — to  use  the  most  maudlin  phrase  which 
modern  criticism  has  concocted — the  message  which 
a  particular  writer  bears,  may  be  that  which  will 
satisfy  the  demands  of  one  nature,  while  to  another 
it  will  convey  little  or  nothing  of  interest  or  value. 
Even  if  the  beauty  of  the  verse  meet  ^vith  an  intel- 


150  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

lectual  recognition,  what  the  verse  contains  may 
supply  no  spiritual  want.  It  is  nothing  strange  that 
Wordsworth  should  be  the  favorite  of  some  men, 
Byron  the  favorite  of  others,  Shelley  the  favorite  of 
still  a  third  body.  Such  preference  is  objectionable 
only  when  the  appreciation  of  one  author  is  conjoined 
with  the  depreciation  of  another  and  a  rival  author. 
No  writer  acquires  and  continues  to  maintain  a  hold 
upon  the  cultivated  public  without  the  possession  of 
great  qualities.  The  favorable  opinion  of  a  large 
number  of  educated  men  is  worth  infinitely  more  than 
the  hostile  opinion  of  the  very  highest  genius.  Criti- 
cism that  denies  the  reputation  which  has  been 
accorded  by  the  consent  of  one  generation  and  con- 
firmed by  the  voice  of  following  generations,  serves 
little  other  purpose  than  to  reveal  the  futility  of 
criticism  itself  and  the  limitations  of  the  critic. 

Accordingly,  we  must  look  at  the  literary  situation 
as  it  existed  then,  not  with  our  own  eyes,  but  with  the 
eyes  of  the  men  of  1830.  At  that  time  the  movement 
against  the  hitherto  unquestioned  supremacy  of  Byron 
began  to  make  effective  manifestation  of  itself.  Along 
with  it  an  active  propaganda  was  instituted  in  behalf 
of  two  very  dissimilar  poets,  whose  reputation,  very 
high  in  limited  circles,  had  nevertheless  up  to  that 
time  been  largely  confined  to  limited  circles.  One  of 
them  indeed  had  at  last  entered  upon  the  fulness  of 
his  fame;  the  other  was  only  beginning  to  loom  into 
prominence.  The  former  was  Wordsworth,  the  latter 
was  Shelley.  Wide  apart  in  many  ways  as  were  the 
views  of  the  adherents  of  these  two  writers,  there  was 


REPUTATIONS  OF  THE  GEORGIAN  ERA      151 

one  thing  in  which  they  agreed.  They  united  in  their 
hostility  to  the  claims  of  the  partisans  of  Byron. 
They  did  not  dread  each  other;  they  dreaded  the 
common  foe.  Shelley  in  particular,  as  being  in  most 
need  of  rehabilitation,  became  an  object  of  enthusiastic 
advocacy.  During  the  years  that  had  elapsed  since 
his  death  he  had  been  by  no  means  forgotten ;  for  from 
the  very  outset  he  had  had  a  band  of  admirers.  Still, 
in  no  sense  of  the  phrase  could  he  be  said  to  be  well 
known;  in  any  proper  sense  he  could  hardly  be  said 
to  be  known  at  all.  It  is  natural  that  revolutions  in 
taste  should  display  themselves  most  vigorously  at 
great  educational  centers,  if  not  there  receive  their 
origin.  The  present  instance  offers  no  exception.  It 
was  at  Cambridge  University  during  the  term  of 
Tennyson's  residence  that  new  critical  standards  had 
begun  to  be  set  up.  Not  unnaturally  a  movement 
started  there  into  being,  designed  to  further  the  spread 
of  Shelley's  reputation.  It  was  one  of  the  singular 
features  connected  with  it  that  some  of  those  most 
prominent  in  advocating  his  claims  were  equally 
uncompromising  partisans  of  Wordsworth.  The  con- 
junction which  would  have  profoundly  shocked  the 
elder  poet  was,  at  that  time  at  least,  rarely  found 
elsewhere. 

It  was  in  1829  that  Arthur  Henry  Hallam  and  a 
number  of  Shelley's  other  admirers  caused  his 
'Adonais'  to  be  reprinted  at  Cambridge  in  an  edition 
of  five  hundred  copies ;  for  with  the  worship  of  Shelley 
was  united  the  worship  of  the  altogether  less  known 
Keats.    This  elegy  on  the  death  of  the  latter  poet  had 


152  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

been  printed  at  Pisa  in  1821.  It  was  not  till  the  little 
band  of  Cambridge  enthusiasts  reproduced  it  in  the 
year  just  mentioned  that  it  was  brought  out  in  Eng- 
land. In  fact  a  not  essentially  dissimilar  state  of 
things  was  at  that  time  true  of  most  of  Shelley's 
productions.  He  began  his  poetical  career  in  1816 
with  the  volume  containing  'Alastor,  or  the  Spirit 
of  Solitude';  for  the  privately  printed  'Queen  Mab' 
of  1813  may  be  disregarded.  The  'Revolt  of  Islam' 
followed  in  1818,  'Rosalind  and  Helen'  and  'The 
Cenci'  in  1819,  'Prometheus  Unbound'  in  1820, 
'Adonais'  and  '  Epipsychidion '  in  1821.  Some  of 
these  were  brought  together  in  a  single  volume  the 
year  after  his  death,  but  very  few  of  them  ever  went, 
strictly  speaking,  into  a  second  edition.  In  truth, 
Shelley's  name,  so  far  as  it  was  known  then,  was  much 
more  associated  in  the  minds  of  men  with  his  atheis- 
tical utterances  and  his  extreme  social  opinions  than 
with  his  poetry.  It  is  a  significant  fact  that  the  one 
production  of  his  which  up  to  1830  had  gone  through 
the  largest  number  of  editions  was  'Queen  Mab';  and 
'Queen  Mab,'  it  is  needless  to  say,  appealed  rather  to 
the  intellectual  sinners  than  to  the  lovers  of  highest 
poetic  art.  Even  later,  the  other  works,  in  spite  of 
frequent  references  to  them  in  the  critical  literature 
of  the  day,  were  often  very  hard  to  obtain. 

There  is  one  noted  instance.  The  youthful  Brown- 
ing chanced  to  come  across  in  a  collection  of  second- 
hand books  exposed  for  sale,  a  volume  which  attracted 
his  attention  by  being  labelled  "Mr.  Shelley's  Atheis- 
tical Poem,  very  scarce."    He  was  so  impressed  by 


REPUTATIONS  OF  THE  GEORGIAN  ERA       153 

the  hasty  perusal  he  was  able  to  give  it  that  he 
implored  his  mother  to  procure  for  him  all  the  pro- 
ductions of  this  author,  of  whom  before  he  had  never 
heard.  It  was  no  easy  task  to  comply  with  his  wishes. 
The  local  booksellers  all  shared  in  the  boy's  ignorance 
of  the  poet.  They  were  no  more  familiar  than  he  mth 
the  writer's  name,  nor  did  they  know  the  titles  of 
the  works  he  had  written.  At  last  the  volumes  were 
secured  at  the  shop  of  the  Olliers  in  Vere  Street,  by 
whom  most  of  them  had  been  published.  With  the 
exception  of  'The  Cenci'  all  were  first  editions. 
Bro\vTiing's  experience  illustrates  with  a  fair  degree 
of  accuracy  the  general  indifference  about  Shelley 
which  existed  on  the  part  of  the  public.  This  had 
naturally  the  effect  of  stimulating  the  enthusiasm  of 
his  partisans.  What  they  lacked  in  numbers  they 
made  up,  as  far  as  they  could,  in  activity.  In  that 
brilliant  circle  which  was  just  at  this  time  assembled 
in  Cambridge  University,  devotion  to  this  poet  was 
very  intense.  A  Shelley  cult  was  established  there. 
It  flourished  for  a  while  with  both  the  vigor  and  the 
extravagance  of  youth.  Its  band  of  worshippers 
exalted  to  the  highest  place  one  who  to  the  great  body 
of  readers  was  an  unknown  god.  Like  every  mis- 
sionary propaganda,  its  first  aim  was  to  destroy  the 
prevailing  religion ;  and  the  prevailing  religion  was 
Byron.  To  proclaim  the  superiority  of  Shelley  to 
Byron  was  accordingly  a  leading  principle  of  the  new 
creed. 

There  is  little  doubt  from  their  later  utterances,  that 
the  Cambridge  men  of  1830  outgrew  their  enthusiasm 


154  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

and  came  in  time  to  be  amused  by  it  themselves — in 
some  instances  in  a  very  short  time.  But  their 
enthusiasm  was  very  earnest  while  it  lasted.  They 
set  out  to  convert  the  world  to  their  belief.  The  record 
of  one  of  their  enterprises  has  been  preserved. 
Shelley  had  been  illtreated,  as  they  thought,  by  the 
authorities  of  the  sister  university.  He  had  been 
expelled  from  it.  He  who  was  a  glory  to  the  institu- 
tion had  received  from  it  scant  favor  while  he  was 
an  attendant  upon  it,  and  no  recognition  of  his  great- 
ness since.  It  struck  these  youthful  admirers  who 
belonged  to  the  Cambridge  Union,  that  it  would  be 
a  good  thing  to  go  over  to  Oxford  and  hold  a  debate 
with  the  members  of  the  Union  there  on  the  compara- 
tive merits  of  Shelley  and  Byron.  Permission  was 
sought  for  the  undertaking  from  the  Master  of  Trinity, 
Christopher  Wordsworth,  the  brother  of  the  poet. 
The  delegation  consisted  of  Arthur  Henry  Hallam, 
Richard  Monckton  Milnes,  and  Thomas  Sunderland. 
In  his  later  year  Milnes  used  to  insinuate  that  it  was 
not  made  perfectly  clear  to  the  venerable  dignitary 
who  presided  over  Trinity,  whether  it  was  the  supe- 
riority of  Shelley  to  Byron  that  they  were  going  forth 
to  maintain,  or  the  superiority  of  Wordsworth  to 
Byron.  At  all  events,  the  permission  was  obtained. 
Early  in  December,  1829,  they  set  out  on  their  mission. 
It  was  then  a  long  trip  of  ten  hours  by  the  post-chaise, 
and  the  pleasure  of  the  journey  was  not  increased  by 
the  fact  that  snow  had  fallen.  On  reaching  Oxford 
they  were  entertained  by  the  members  of  the  rival 
Union.     Of  one  of  these  Milnes  wrote  to  his  mother 


REPUTATIONS  OF  THE  GEORGIAN  ERA      155 

that  lie  was  sure  he  was  a  "very  superior  person." 
This  very  superior  person  was  young  Mr.  Gladstone 
of  Liverpool.  He,  however,  took  no  part  in  the 
discussion. 

The  debate,  we  are  told,  went  off  in  very  fine  style ; 
but  as  regards  the  impression  produced,  it  must  have 
been  somewhat  disappointing.  According  to  the 
report  of  Milnes'  as  late  as  1866,  the  Cambridge 
delegation,  in  all  the  fervor  of  their  early  enthusiasm, 
had  their  feelings  very  much  shocked  and  their  vanity 
a  good  deal  wounded  to  find  that  no  one  at  Oxford 
knew  anything  at  all  about  Mr.  Shelley,  either  for 
good  or  ill.  It  was  a  mortifying  fact  to  discover  that 
no  small  number  of  the  eighty  or  ninety  young  gentle- 
men of  the  Oxford  Union,  who  sat  sprucely  dressed 
in  chairs  or  lounged  about  the  fireplace,  fancied  that 
it  was  Mr.  Shenstone  they  had  come  to  talk  about,  and 
declared  that  they  knew  of  only  one  poem  of  his,  that 
beginning  with  the  words,  ''My  banks,  they  are  fur- 
nished with  bees. ' '  A  very  little  later  a  contemporary 
gave  an  account  of  the  result  of  this  particular 
missionary  enterprise  to  establish  the  superiority  of 
Shelley  to  Byron.  ' '  Sunderland,  Milnes,  and  Hallam, ' ' 
wrote  Blakesley  to  Trench,  "made  an  expedition  to 
Oxford,  and  spoke  there  in  favor  of  the  former, 
thereby  of  course  procuring  to  themselves  the  repu- 
tation of  atheists.  Howbeit  they  gained  some  converts 
and  spread  the  knowledge  of  the  poet,  so  that  some 
illuminati  of  the  sister  university,  who  at  first  took 
him  for  Shenstone,  and  then  for  'the  man  who  drives 

I'Life,  Letters,  and  Friendships,'  Vol.  II,  p.  163. 


156  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

the  black  ponies  in  Hyde  Park, '  at  last  went  away  with 
the  belief  'that  he  was  a  man  whom  Lord  Byron 
patronized,  and  who  was  drowned  a  few  years  ago. '  '  '^ 
In  his  'Reminiscences,'  Sir  Francis  Hastings  Doyle 
asserts  that  the  statements  made  about  this  memo- 
rable debate  by  two  of  its  participants — Lord  Hough- 
ton and  Cardinal  Manning — are  hazy  and  incorrect; 
but  his  own  version  differs  from  theirs  only  in  unim- 
portant particulars.  Doyle  tells  us  that  it  was  he 
himself,  acting  under  Cambridge  influences,  who 
brought  forward  for  discussion  in  the  Oxford  Union  a 
motion  that  Shelley  was  a  greater  poet  than  Byron. 
It  would,  he  said,  have  been  a  perfectly  languid  debate, 
as  were  all  non-political  ones,  had  it  not  been  for  the 
arrival  of  the  Cambridge  men.  This  was  sufficient  to 
fill  the  benches.  Of  these  Cambridge  men,  Sunderland 
spoke  first.  He  was  followed  by  Hallam.  They  in  turn 
were  followed  by  Oldham  of  Oriel  who  proceeded  vig- 
orously to  pooh-pooh  the  pretensions  of  Shelley,  of 
whom  he  knew  absolutely  nothing,  till  he  chanced  to 
catch  sight  of  Milnes  waiting  to  fall  upon  him.  At  once 
he  lost  heart  and  to  the  mingled  amazement  and  amuse- 
ment of  his  hearers  went  over  to  the  side  he  had  begun 
by  attacking.  After  the  speech  of  Milnes  a  short  silence 
followed.  The  truth  is  that  the  Oxford  advocates  of 
Byron  were  a  good  deal  at  a  loss  what  to  say:  for  in 
general  they  were  not  merely  unacquainted  with  the 
poetry  of  Shelley,  they  were  unaware  of  even  the 
existence  of  the  man  himself.  This  explains  the 
hesitation  that  prevailed.    Finally  Manning  of  Balliol, 

1  E.  C.  Trench 's  '  Letters  and  Memorials, '  Vol.  I,  p.  50. 


REPUTATIONS  OF  THE  GEORGIAN  ERA       157 

the  \drtual  leader  of  the  Union,  rose  to  reply  to  the 
arguments  of  the  Cambridge  men.  According  to  Doyle 
the  substance  of  his  argument  was  essentially  as 
follows :  Byron  was  a  great  poet  because  he  had  been 
read  by  them  all.  Consequently  he  was  knowTi  to  them 
all.  If  Shelley  had  been  a  great  poet,  he  would  have 
been  read  by  them  all  and  necessarily  would  have  been 
known  to  them  all.  As  this  was  not  the  case,  he  was 
not  a  great  poet.  All  the  more  it  followed  that  he  was 
not  so  great  a  poet  as  Byron.  In  this  view,  when  it 
came  to  a  vote,  the  Union  concurred  by  a  large 
majority.^ 

Doyle,  though  he  does  not  mention  it,  was  the  one 
who  opened  the  debate.  He  was  followed  by  Sunder- 
land, the  first  of  the  Cambridge  trio.  Sunderland  is 
the  person  referred  to  in  Tennyson's  sketch,  entitled 
*A  Character.'  From  that  it  may  easily  be  gathered 
that  he  was  far  from  being  a  favorite  of  the  poet.  He 
was  further  described  by  him  as  ''a  very  plausible, 
parliament-like,  self-satisfied  speaker  at  the  Union 
Debating  Society."  Sunderland  retorted  in  his  turn. 
When  told  that  he  was  the  one  meant  in  the  poem  just 
mentioned,  he  remarked,  "Oh,  really,  and  which 
Tennyson  did  you  say  wrote  it?  The  slovenly  one?" 
The  poet's  opinion  of  the  man  was  assuredly  not 
shared  by  his  fellow  students.  They  looked  up  to  him 
with  admiration.  To  him  they  awarded  the  palm  of 
oratory.  The  highest  expectations  were  entertained 
of  the  brilliancy  of  his  future.  Whether  their  antici- 
pations would  have  been  fulfilled,  it  is  of  course  impos- 

1  F.  M.  Brookfield's  'Cambridge  Apostles,'  p.  130. 


158  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

sible  to  say;  for  shortly  after  graduation  he  was 
seized  by  a  mysterious  malady  under  which  he  lin- 
gered a  physical  and  intellectual  wreck  until  his  death 
in  1867.  He  ended,  it  is  said,  in  believing  himself  the 
Almighty — which,  however,  is  not  an  altogether  unex- 
ampled state  of  mind  in  men  assumed  to  be  perfectly 
sane. 

But  there  is  no  question  as  to  the  profound  impres- 
sion wrought  by  Sunderland  on  this  occasion  upon  his 
Oxford  hearers,  though  his  two  comrades  thought  at 
the  time  that  he  was  hardly  up  to  his  usual  level.  More 
than  two  years  later  Charles  Wordsworth  in  a  letter 
to  his  brother  Christopher  spoke  of  a  great  oration 
which  Gladstone  had  delivered  in  a  political  debate 
which  had  taken  place  in  the  Oxford  Union.  It  was,  he 
wrote,  ''the  most  splendid  speech,  out  and  out,  that 
was  ever  heard  in  our  Society — not  excepting  Sunder- 
land's Shelleian  harangue.'"  That  harangue,  by  the 
profound  impression  it  made,  evidently  served  as  a 
standard  to  measure  the  efforts  of  others.  The  Oxford 
men  were  clearly  at  a  disadvantage  in  this  debate.  In 
addition  to  knowing  nothing  about  Shelley,  the  deco- 
rous and  self-restrained  men  of  the  sister  university 
were  struck  with  astonishment  and  almost  bewildered 
by  the  fervor  and  fire  of  the  Cambridge  speakers. 
They  felt  very  much,  according  to  their  own  descrip- 
tion, as  the  polished  Romans  of  the  later  empire  must 
have  felt  on  coming  into  contact  with  the  rude  bar- 
barians of  the  North  when  they  swept  down  upon  them 

1  Letter  of  May  24,  1831,  in  Charles  Wordsworth's  'Annals  of  my 
Early  Life,'  1891,  p.  86. 


REPUTATIONS  OF  THE  GEORGIAN  ERA       159 

from  their  ^vintry  clime.  ' '  Both  Monckton  Milnes  and 
Henry  Hallam,"  wrote  Cardinal  Manning  in  Novem- 
ber, 1866,  ''took  us  aback  by  the  boldness  and  freedom 
of  their  manner.  But  I  remember  the  effect  of  Sunder- 
land's  declamation  and  action  to  this  day.  It  had  never 
been  seen  or  heard  before  among  us ;  we  cowered  like 
birds,  and  ran  like  sheep.  "^ 

The  different  accounts  of  this  debate  are  of  interest, 
because,  however  much  they  vary  in  details,  they  all 
agree  in  their  representations  of  the  general  ignorance 
that  prevailed  about  Shelley  and  his  poetry  among  the 
educated  public  at  the  beginning  of  the  fourth  decade 
of  the  nineteenth  century.  Outside  of  a  limited  circle 
he  was  little  spoken  of,  and  when  spoken  of,  it  was  not 
unfrequently  to  his  disadvantage.  But  during  the 
period  from  1830  to  1840  his  reputation  rose  rapidly. 
His  still  unpublished  writings  were  brought  out  either 
separately  or  in  the  shape  of  contributions  to  periodi- 
cals. Not  merely  the  willingness  but  the  anxiety  of 
editors  to  secure  them  shows  how  rapidly  the  interest 
in  the  man  and  in  his  productions  was  rising.  The 
references  to  him  in  the  critical  literature  of  this 
fourth  decade  not  only  increase  in  number  but  in  the 
warmth  of  the  testimony  they  pay  to  his  genius.  For 
the  change  in  opinion  that  was  going  on,  there  was 
ample  reason.  The  little  that  had  been  kno^vn  of  him 
pre\dously,  especially  as  reported  by  his  enemies,  was 
usually  of  an  offensive  nature.  His  course  had  seemed 
to  outrage  all  the  social  traditions  and  moral  beliefs 
of  his  native  land.    What  information  was  now  cora- 

1  E.  S.  Purcell's  'Life  of  Cardinal  Manning,'  1896,  Vol.  I,  p.  33. 


160  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

ing  to  light  redounded  ordinarily  to  his  credit.  Much 
indeed  of  what  he  had  done  could  not  be  palliated  by 
sophistry  or  condoned  by  the  circumstances  by  which 
he  was  surrounded.  A  feeling  of  this  sort  was  almost 
universal.  Even  in  the  most  favorable  notices  of  his 
career  or  of  his  writings  there  was  apt  to  be  a  regret- 
ful reference  to  the  life  he  had  lived,  and  the  opinions 
he  had  entertained  and  promulgated.  But  there  was 
also  a  disposition  to  forget  and  forgive  his  follies  and 
his  faults  on  the  part  of  the  sternest  of  his  critics,  as 
well  as  to  pay  due  honor  to  his  unquestionable  genius. 
The  general  critical  attitude  of  the  fourth  decade 
towards  Shelley  may  be  summed  up  in  the  admission 
that  he  was  a  fallen  angel,  to  be  sure;  but  that  after 
all  it  is  a  good  deal  to  be  an  angel,  even  if  a  fallen  one ; 
and  that  for  the  sake  of  the  noun  the  adjective  could 
be  endured. 

Yet  in  spite  of  the  steadily  increasing  regard  enter- 
tained for  Shelley  there  is  one  bibliographical  fact 
which  shows  unmistakably  how  little,  comparatively 
speaking,  was  the  hold  which  he  had  gained  as  yet  over 
the  general  public  of  educated  men.  It  was  not  till 
1839,  fifteen  years  after  his  death,  that  an  authorized 
edition  of  his  works,  purporting  to  be  in  any  way 
complete,  was  brought  out  under  the  super\'ision  of  his 
widow.  Even  this  was  not  really  complete.  In  defer- 
ence to  what  was  called  morality,  'Queen  Mab'  was 
omitted  from  the  first  edition.  It  was  not  until  indig- 
nant protest  came  from  the  admirers  of  the  poet  that 
it  was  added  to  the  edition  which  speedily  followed. 
Up  to  this  time  the  public  that  wished  to  read  Shelley 


REPUTATIONS  OF  THE  GEORGIAN  ERA       161 

had  been  obliged  to  content  itself  either  with  the 
original  editions  of  his  writings,  even  then  none  too 
easy  to  get,  or  mth  the  imperfect  and  vilely  printed 
collections  which  came  out  in  two  volumes  from  the 
booksellers.  Doubtless  had  he  lived,  the  general 
recognition  of  his  genius  would  have  come  earlier  with 
the  impression  made  upon  the  world  of  readers  by 
the  production  of  new  works,  or  new  editions  of  old 
works.  But  it  was  making  rapid  progress  during  this 
period  of  transition,  and  by  the  end  of  it  he  had  taken 
a  position  from  which  he  has  never  been  displaced. 

To  Keats  this  fortune  came  even  later.  During  the 
fourth  decade  of  the  century  his  name  is  but  little 
mentioned,  either  with  praise  or  blame,  in  the  critical 
literature  of  the  period;  and  when  it  does  occur,  it 
is  frequently,  perhaps  in  most  cases,  spelled  wrongly. 
Many  of  the  few  references  to  him  could  well  have  been 
spared;  for  they  were  too  often  expressions  of  con- 
tumely and  contempt.  Yet,  after  all,  such  outgivings 
are  apt  to  be  misleading  and  in  this  instance  time  has 
shown  their  utter  delusiveness.  The  acknowledgment 
of  his  greatness  would  have  come  speedily  had  he  sur- 
vived. Even  at  that  early  period  more  than  one  coun- 
terbalancing view  came  from  high  critical  authority. 
There  were  those,  then,  who  believed  that  if  he  lived 
he  would  be  the  head  of  the  follomng  generation  of 
poets.  * '  Lamb  places  him  next  to  Wordsworth, ' '  wrote 
Henry  Crabb  Robinson  in  December,  1820 — ''not 
meaning  any  comparison,  for  they  are  dissimilar." 
His  early  death  delayed  the  general  recognition  of  his 
genius  until  the  fifth  decade  of  the  century;  but  the 


162  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

interest  in  him  and  his  writings  had  been  slowly 
gathering  force  and  volume  during  the  intervening 
years.  When  at  last  it  burst  forth  into  public  mani- 
festation, it  overbore  at  once  all  opposition.  During 
the  period  of  transition,  however,  it  influenced  com- 
paratively few ;  but  one  of  the  few  it  influenced  deeply ; 
and  he  was  the  man  who  was  destined  to  be  the  domi- 
nant force  in  the  literature  of  the  Victorian  period. 
Even  in  that  early  day,  those  who  were  the  admirers 
of  Keats  recognized  in  Tennyson  the  one  upon  whom 
his  mantle  had  fallen;  but  neither  of  the  two  then 
attracted  the  attention  of  any  but  the  most  limited 
number. 


CHxiPTER  VI 

THE   LITERARY   SITUATION   IN   THE    TRANSITION 

PERIOD 

Part  Three 
Popular  Authors  of  the  Period 

The  decade  between  1830  and  1840  has  been  styled  in 
the  preceding  sections  the  literary  interregnum.  The 
limits  might  perhaps  be  justifiably  extended  so  as  to 
include  the  years  between  the  death  of  Byron  in  1824 
and  the  publication  of  the  Tennyson  volumes  of  1842. 
During  this  period  poems  were  produced  and  published 
which  stand  now  much  higher  in  the  public  estimation 
than  they  did  then.  Their  merit  indeed  was  often  little 
recognized  at  the  time.  Only  one  man  is  remembered 
by  us  at  the  present  day  who  attained  high  reputation 
among  those  of  his  contemporaries  whose  opinion  was 
worth  considering.  In  the  decade  which  witnessed  the 
advent  of  Tennyson  and  Browning,  the  single  new 
poetic  reputation,  accepted  by  critical  contemporaries, 
which  still  survives,  was  achieved  by  a  writer  even 
then  unknown  save  to  a  comparatively  limited  number 
of  readers  and  never  in  fact  widely  known  since.  Still 
though  his  superiority  was  acknowledged  at  the  time 
by  but  a  small  circle,  it  was  a  circle  that  carried  with 


164  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OP  TENNYSON 

it  the  most  authoritative  estimate  of  contemporary 
opinion.  During  the  period  under  discussion,  his 
poetry  was  generally  rated  as  far  superior  to  that  of 
his  two  countrymen,  whom  we  look  upon  as  the  great 
representative  authors  of  the  Victorian  era;  and  this 
continued  to  be  the  case  to  some  extent  to  a  much  later 
date. 

This  man  was  Henry  Taylor,  who  in  1869  was  made 
Knight  Commander  of  the  Order  of  St.  Michael  and 
St.  George.  For  a  good  share  of  his  life  he  was  nomi- 
nally a  clerk  in  the  colonial  office,  but  really  one  of  the 
rulers  of  the  colonies.  From  his  boyhood  he  had  been 
addicted  to  literature.  Born  in  the  last  year  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  he  had  published  in  1827  a  play 
entitled  '  Isaac  Comnenus. '  It  fell  dead  from  the  press. 
A  criticism  of  it  by  Southey  in  'The  Quarterly  Review' 
for  October,  1828,  failed  to  revive  it  in  spite  of  its  very 
favorable  character.  Its  ill  fortune  did  not  discourage 
the  author  w^ho  professed  himself  to  be  naturally  of  an 
unhopeful  state  of  mind;  but  it  prevented  his  feeling 
any  desire  to  hurry  into  print  a  second  time.  In  fact, 
several  years  elapsed  before  he  was  ready  to  try  again 
his  fortune  with  the  public.  Southey  had  suggested  to 
him  as  the  subject  of  a  drama  the  story  of  the  Flemish 
leader,  Philip  Van  Artevelde.  The  idea  pleased  him. 
In  1828  he  began  work  upon  the  poem  so  far  as  the 
pressure  of  official  duties  would  give  him  leisure. 
"V\1ien  finished,  the  difficulty  was  to  find  a  publisher. 
Murray,  who  had  brought  out  'Isaac  Comnenus,'  had 
a  lively  recollection  of  the  failure  of  that  drama,  and 
was  not  disposed  to  repeat  the  experiment.     Moxon, 


POPULAE  AUTHORS  OF  THE  PERIOD    165 

to  whom  he  was  referred,  was  likewise  not  enthusiastic. 
Still,  as  the  author  was  willing  to  bear  the  expense  of 
publication,  he  was  willing  to  take  the  work  upon  those 
terms. 

Taylor  and  his  friends  belonged  to  the  Wordsworth- 
ian  school,  the  first  article  in  whose  creed  was  that  a 
work  of  genius  could  not  be  popular  until  the  proper 
taste  had  been  created  to  appreciate  it.  This  would  be 
a  comfortable  doctrine  to  believe  in  case  of  failure, 
were  there  not  so  many  thousands  of  authors,  good 
and  bad,  and  generally  bad,  with  whom  one  has  to 
share  its  consolations.  Taylor  fancied  that  his  work 
was  at  issue  with  the  taste  of  the  public  and  therefore 
necessarily  superior  to  it.  Consequently  it  could  not 
hope  to  achieve  pecuniary  success  or  to  bring  him 
speedy  reputation.  Nevertheless  he  made  the  venture. 
Accordingly  a  limited  edition  in  two  volumes  of  five 
hundred  copies  of  the  drama  of  *  Philip  Van  Artevelde ' 
came  out  early  in  June,  1834. 

The  publication  had  been  kept  back  in  order  to  have 
the  work  make  its  appearance  at  the  same  time  with 
the  laudatory  notice  in  the  'Quarterly,'  written  by 
Lockhart ;  for  that  review  practised  as  one  of  its  first 
virtues  that  its  contributors  should  be  aided.  There 
were  also  several  other  articles  in  praise  of  it  imme- 
diately after  its  appearance,  written  by  personal 
friends  for  the  leading  critical  weeklies.  How  far  its 
favorable  reception  was  due  to  these  notices  it  is  hard 
to  tell;  yet  there  seems  little  reason  to  doubt  that 
without  them,  the  merit  of  the  drama  would  have 
secured  its  speedy  recognition.    At  all  events,  the  work 


166  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

was  a  success,  at  least  what  the  author  deemed  success. 
The  general  tone  of  approval  was  such  as  no  other 
poetical  work  received  from  the  principal  leading  lit- 
erary periodicals  during  the  period  from  1830  to  1850. 
Taylor  as  a  Wordsworthian  ought  to  have  been  pro- 
foundly grieved  by  his  good  fortune;  but  such  is  the 
perversity  of  human  nature,  he  was  sincerely  delighted. 
His  duty  was  to  believe  that  he  had  shown  himself  a 
middling  poet  by  having  at  once  pleased  the  public. 
On  the  contrary  he  evinced  a  most  reprehensible  pref- 
erence for  present  fame  to  any  arrears  of  renown  in 
reversion.  Greville,  his  intimate  friend,  tells  us  in  his 
diary  that  the  author  with  the  vivacity  of  a  sanguine 
disposition  and  a  confidence  in  the  sterling  merits  of 
the  poem,  believed  that  edition  would  follow  edition 
like  wave  upon  wave.^  Taylor  himself  mentions  with 
pride  in  his  autobiography  that  the  first  edition  was 
almost  immediately  sold,  and  a  new  one  had  to  be  put 
in  press  without  delay. 

One  may  get  a  somewhat  false  idea  of  the  success 
of  the  work  from  this  account.  The  first  edition  con- 
sisted, as  has  been  said,  of  but  five  hundred  copies; 
and  whatever  was  the  number  of  the  second,  it  sup- 
plied for  some  time  all  the  demand  that  existed.  The 
work  continued  to  have  a  steady  and  respectable  sale 
but  not  a  great  one.  In  1835  Moxon  informed  Brown- 
ing that  'Artevelde'  had  not  paid  expenses  by  thirty- 
odd  pounds.  This  refers  to  the  first  edition  which, 
though  it  was  all  sold,  Greville  reports  as  giving  a 

1  C.  C.  F.  Greville 's  '  Journal  of  the  Reigns  of  George  IV  and  William 
IV,'  under  date  of  July  24,  1834. 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  OF  THE  PERIOD    167 

balance  against  Taylor  of  thirty-seven  pounds  when 
his  account  with  the  publisher  was  made  up.  One 
comes  in  time  to  have  an  immense  respect  for  the 
system  of  bookkeeping  prevailing  in  the  trade,  so  gen- 
erally successful  is  it  in  bringing  the  author  into  debt. 
Taylor  could  therefore  content  himself  after  all  vnth 
the  fact  that,  however  well  spoken  of  by  the  critics, 
his  work  had  met  with  no  great  sale  among  the  herd ; 
and  this  was  a  state  of  things  which  continued  to  be 
true  during  the  more  than  half-century  of  life  that 
followed.  Still,  in  spite  of  its  comparatively  limited 
circulation,  'Philip  Van  Artevelde'  was  a  very  genuine 
success.  For  several  years  foUomng  its  publication 
the  estimation  in  which  it  was  held  was  sufficient  to 
make  Taylor  not  only  a  poet  of  distinction  in  the  eyes 
of  the  cultivated,  but  tJie  poet  of  distinction  of  the 
younger  men  then  coming  forward.  His  future  was 
regarded  as  assured.  His  society  was  courted.  The 
doors  of  Lansdo^^^le  House  and  of  Holland  House — 
then  the  two  great  literary  salons — were,  he  tells  us 
himself,  thrown  open.  During  the  rest  of  the  fourth 
decade  and  even  later,  he  was  a  far  more  prominent 
figure  in  literature  than  any  of  the  great  younger 
writers  who  were  just  then  setting  out  on  their  career 
of  fame.  He  admits  that  this  period  of  sudden  celeb- 
rity was  overclouded  or  rather  outshone  in  the  course 
of  time ;  but  he  assures  us  that  it  was  very  agreeable 
while  it  lasted.  The  year  1842  that  saw  the  rise  of 
Tennyson  marked  the  beginning  of  the  subsidence  of 
Henry  Taylor.  Yet  many  kept  up  their  faith  in  him 
as  the  leading  poet  of  the  younger  generation  for  a 


168  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

much  longer  period.  Evidence  of  this  feeling  can  be 
found  plentifully  not  merely  in  the  critical  literature 
of  the  day,  but  in  the  correspondence  of  eminent  men. 

This  contemporary  estimate,  coming  from  the  per- 
sons it  did,  very  likely  affected  Taylor's  attitude 
towards  his  brother  poets.  There  is  found  in  his  auto- 
biography a  curious  passage  in  a  letter  to  him  of  about 
1860  from  Tennyson's  neighbor,  Mrs.  Cameron.  The 
object  of  Mrs.  Cameron's  hero-worship  was  her  corre- 
spondent. She  annoyed  some  people  but  amused  a  far 
larger  number  by  rating  Tennyson  inferior  to  Taylor 
as  a  poet.  ''Alfred,"  she  writes,  ''has  grown,  he  says, 
much  fonder  of  you  since  your  two  last  visits  here. 
He  says  he  feels  now  he  is  beginning  to  know  you  and 
not  to  feel  afraid  of  you,  and  that  he  is  beginning  to  get 
over  your  extreme  insolence  to  him  when  he  was  young 
and  you  were  in  your  meridian  splendor  of  glory.  So 
one  reads  your  simplicity."^  It  may  be  that  it  did 
indicate  a  misunderstanding  on  Tennyson's  part  of 
Taylor's  simplicity — or  again  it  may  not.  But  it  cer- 
tainly makes  manifest  the  position  held  by  the  two 
poets  in  the  general  estimation  of  the  time.  Whatever 
may  have  been  the  private  opinion  of  their  compara- 
tive merits  entertained  by  the  greater  author,  it  is 
clear  that  he  then  recognized  plainly  that  in  the  eyes 
of  the  public  his  station  was  much  lower. 

Taylor  never  repeated  this  early  success.  From 
time  to  time  he  put  forth  new  dramatic  pieces  of  much 
more  than  average  merit ;  but  none  of  them  attained  to 
the  popularity  of  this,  his  second  venture.    It  is  curious 

1 ' Autobiography  of  Henry  Taylor,'  Vol.  II,  p.   193. 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  OF  THE  PERIOD         169 

to  note  that  the  result  was  foreseen  by  some  of  the  men 
who  noticed  this  work;  and  as  literary  history  is  full 
of  illustrations  of  critical  obtuseness,  it  is  just  that 
examples  of  critical  insight  should  occasionally  be 
given.  The  reviewer  in  'The  Literary  Gazette,'  clearly 
ignorant  of  the  personality  of  the  author,  and  indeed 
f ancjdng  him  a  man  of  advanced  age,  praised  the  work 
highly  under  that  impression.  He  declared  that  it  was 
the  fruit  of  a  life.  "  As  it  has  no  precursor, ' '  he  wrote, 
'Sve  doubt  its  having  a  successor."  So  far  as  the  pub- 
lic was  concerned,  it  never  had  a  successor.  Taylor's 
later  productions  w^ere  received  with  that  calm  and 
languid  approval  which  is  more  disheartening  to  an 
author  who  has  once  met  with  favor,  than  the  most 
ferocious  criticism.  In  1842  he  brought  out  an  his- 
torical drama  entitled  'Edwin,  the  Fair,'  and  in  1850 
still  another  drama  originally  entitled  'The  Virgin 
Widow,'  and  subsequently  'A  Sicilian  Summer.'  This 
was  an  effort  on  his  part  to  revive  the  Elizabethan 
comedy  of  romance.  Indeed,  all  his  pieces  are  imita- 
tive of  the  language  of  the  playwrights  of  that  period. 
It  met  with  no  particular  success,  though  he  himself 
preferred  it,  at  least  in  many  ways,  to  his  other  pro- 
ductions. ' '  The  World, ' '  he  said  in  1858,  ' '  cared  noth- 
ing about  '  The  Virgin  Widow, '  and  would  not  read  it, 
though  it  had  always  seemed  to  me  the  pleasantest 
play  I  had  written,  and  I  never  could  tell  why  people 
would  not  be  pleased  ^\ith  it.'"  His  last  production — 
and  with  it  his  poetical  career  terminated — was  en- 
titled 'St.  Clement's  Eve.'    It  came  out  in  June,  1862, 

1 '  Autobiography, '  Vol.  II,  p.  41. 


170  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

and  according  to  his  own  account  had  a  better  recep- 
tion than  the  previous  comedy.  Of  an  edition  of  fif- 
teen hundred  copies,  nine  hundred  had  been  sold  in 
six  months.  But  none  of  these  plays  attained  either  to 
the  sale  or  the  reputation  of  the  work  which  had 
brought  him  his  first  fame.  To  the  day  of  his  death — 
Taylor  lived  until  1886 — he  was  known  and  spoken  of 
as  the  author  of  'Philip  Van  Artevelde.' 

There  may  be  many  now  who  will  be  disposed  to 
smile  at  the  extravagant  language  which  was  used  by 
the  critics  of  the  thirties  and  later  in  praise  of  this 
production.  Yet  there  was  a  good  deal  to  justify  the 
enthusiasm  which  they  expressed.  There  was  much  in 
the  work  which  bore  out  fully  the  eulogies  which  were 
heaped  upon  it.  The  choice  of  the  subject  was  a  par- 
ticularly happy  one,  and  there  was  a  philosophic  tone 
about  the  whole  production  which  lifted  it  into  a  much 
higher  atmosphere  than  that  of  the  popular  poetry  of 
the  day.  Though  a  drama,  it  was  not  intended  for 
stage  representation.  The  opening  sentence  of  the 
preface  seems  to  indicate  that  its  length  was  the  main 
objection  in  the  author's  eyes.  He  there  says  that  the 
two  parts  and  the  interlude,  of  which  the  entire  work 
consists,  are  equal  in  length  to  about  six  such  plays  as 
are  adapted  to  representation.  Still  in  spite  of  this 
disclaimer  the  experiment  was  tried.  Macready,  who 
ought  to  have  been  a  first-class  judge,  was  profoundly 
impressed  by  the  drama  upon  its  appearance.  His 
diary  contains  a  number  of  references  to  it.  He  cen- 
sured what  he  considered  the  affectation  seen  in  the 
coining  of  unrequired  words  and  the  occasional  obscur- 


POPULAK  AUTHORS  OF  THE  PERIOD    171 

ity;  but  withal,  he  said,  ''there  is  so  much  truth,  phi- 
losophy, poetry,  and  beauty,  combined  with  passion 
and  descriptive  power  of  no  ordinary  character,  that  I 
was  obliged  to  force  myself  to  lay  the  book  down." 
It  continued  a  favorite  work  with  him,  and  when  a 
dozen  years  later,  he  met  the  author  personally,  the 
idea  of  bringing  out  the  piece  on  the  stage  seemed  to 
have  occurred  to  him.  The  project  was  carried  into 
effect.  On  November  22,  1847,  it  was  produced  at  the 
Princess's  Theater  where  Macready  was  then  acting. 
It  could  not  be  called  successful.  It  was  acted  but  five 
times.  It  may  be  added  that  the  author  tells  us  in  his 
autobiography  that  he  did  not  see  it  until  the  sixth  rep- 
resentation— a  representation  at  which  it  never  ar- 
rived. Macready  gives  an  exaggerated  account  of  its 
failure  in  a  passage  in  his  diary  in  which  occurs  from 
his  own  point  of  view  a  brief  comment  on  the  result 
of  the  first  night's  performance.  ''Failed.  I  cannot 
think  it  my  fault, ' '  he  wrote.  He  was  a  good  deal  dis- 
appointed. "I  certainly  laboured,"  he  added,  "more 
than  my  due  in  regard  to  the  whole  play,  and  much  of 
my  own  part  of  Van  Artevelde  I  acted  well;  but  the 
play  was  so  under-acted  by  the  people  engaged  in  it, 
that  it  broke  down  under  their  weight." 

In  spite  of  the  excellence  of  its  poetry,  'Philip  Van 
Artevelde'  had  little  chance  of  success  as  an  acting 
play.  This  was  apparent  to  the  author  at  the  outset; 
at  least  he  had  so  expressed  himself  in  the  preface  to 
the  original  work.  After  it  had  been  produced,  he 
changed  his  mind,  though  he  conceded  that  his  judg- 
ment was  not  worth  much.    "My  opinion,"  he  wrote, 


172  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

*  * .  .  .  was  that  the  play  was  by  no  means  ill-suited  to 
the  stage,  though  I  should  not  have  hazarded  such  an 
opinion  had  I  not  seen  it  there. ' '  Looked  at  from  the 
purely  literary  point  of  view,  it  undoubtedly  was  then 
and  is  now  much  better  suited  to  the  stage  than  the 
immense  majority  of  the  pieces  brought  out ;  but  when 
it  is  contrasted  with  any  great  work  of  its  class,  its 
inferiority  in  this  particular  is  at  once  recognized. 
The  undramatic  character  of  'Philip  Van  Artevelde' 
is  shown  in  almost  every  scene.  It  is  really  a  novel  in 
blank  verse,  or  as  the  author  himself  called  it,  an  His- 
torical Romance  cast  in  dramatic  form.  The  charac- 
ters are  revealed  to  us ;  they  do  not  reveal  themselves. 
Long  before  they  appear,  at  least  before  they  become 
prominent,  they  are  carefully  described.  So  far  from 
experiencing  any  surprise  at  anything  they  do,  we  are 
prepared  for  it,  we  anticipate  it.  There  is  in  conse- 
quence a  lack  of  exciting  situations;  nothing  of  the 
startling  effect  of  the  unexpected,  in  which  the  drama 
delights.  This  laborious  preparation  of  the  mind  for 
what  is  coming  is  conspicuous  in  the  way  the  chief 
character  is  heralded.  Philip  Van  Artevelde  is  to  be 
the  great  leader  of  Ghent  against  the  Earl  of  Flanders. 
It  takes  the  whole  of  the  first  act  to  get  him  into  his 
situation,  and  by  the  time  he  has  got  there,  we  know 
him  so  well  that  we  feel  confident  just  how  he  must 
conduct  himself. 

Such  a  method  of  depicting  characters  is  legitimate 
in  the  novel,  but  it  does  not  do  for  the  stage.  As  a 
drama  pure  and  simple  the  work  fails  therefore  in 
dramatic  art.    Furthermore,  while  showing  throughout 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  OF  THE  PERIOD    173 

poetic  ability  of  a  high  order,  it  does  not  reach  the 
heights  occupied  by  poetic  genius.  This  is  the  impres- 
sion which,  it  seems,  the  dispassionate  reading  of  the 
work  ordinarily  makes  upon  the  large  majority  of 
cultivated  men.  We  respect  it,  we  admire  it;  but  we 
are  not  inspired  by  it.  It  interests,  but  it  does  not  stir 
us  profoundly.  This  is,  in  fact,  the  prevailing  charac- 
teristic of  all  of  Taylor's  dramas.  We  see  the  same 
condition  of  things  in  the  play  of  '  The  Virgin  Widow, ' 
the  little  success  of  which  Taylor  professed  himself 
unable  to  understand.  Like  'Philip  Van  Artevelde,'  it 
is  an  artificial  creation,  it  is  not  an  organic  growth. 
Both  are  well-constructed  pieces  of  mechanism,  the 
work  of  an  artist  so  painstaking  and  clever,  that  there 
is  scarcely  a  place  where  one  can  lay  a  finger  on  a  flaw. 
But  throughout  each,  life  and  passion  are  lacking. 
Both  are  anatomical  studies,  interesting  for  the  skill 
with  which  they  have  been  put  together,  attractive 
often  for  the  philosophical  and  poetical  garb  with 
which  the  skeletons  are  clothed;  but  they  are  not 
living,  breathing  forces. 

Yet  Taylor  is  and  will  always  remain  an  interesting 
poet,  attractive  to  the  few  if  never  widely  read  by  the 
many.  Furthermore,  he  must  have  been  a  man  of  very 
pronounced  personality.  The  deference  paid  to  him 
by  the  ablest  of  his  contemporaries,  the  respect  enter- 
tained for  his  opinions  and  his  achievements,  show 
that  he  must  have  been  possessed  of  qualities  entirely 
out  of  the  common.  To  mention  two  of  his  most  inti- 
mate associates  out  of  a  very  large  number,  he  was  a 
favored  friend  of  both  Southey  and  Wordsworth.   John 


174  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

Sterling,  who  knew  him  well,  wrote  to  Trench  not  long 
after  the  publication  of  'Philip  Van  Artevelde'  that 
Taylor  had  "the  best  balanced  mind — is,  on  the  whole, 
nearest  the  perfect  man  of  the  ancients — of  all  I  have 
ever  known.  His  poem  seems  to  me  splendid."^ 
Towards  the  close  of  his  life  Swinburne,  while  con- 
troverting Taylor's  views  about  Shelley,  paid  him  a 
tribute  of  extreme  deference,  and  expressed  the  highest 
admiration  of  his  powers — though  it  must  be  confessed 
that  Swinburne  as  a  critic  has  always  been  subject  to 
attacks  of  extravagant  and  irresponsible  enthusiasm, 
in  which  praise  is  ladled  out  with  a  dreadful  profusion 
of  adjectives  and  a  plentiful  lack  of  discrimination. 

Still,  there  is  no  question  as  to  the  high  estimation  in 
which  Taylor  was  held  during  his  whole  life  by  men 
whose  good  opinion  was  worth  having.  Yet  with  so 
much  to  be  justly  admired,  there  seems  to  have  been 
something  essentially  prosaic  in  his  nature.  This  may 
explain  in  part  why  with  his  manifest  poetical  sensi- 
bility he  never  attained  the  highest  grade  as  a  poet. 
His  failure  there  is  most  conspicuous  in  his  lyric 
pieces.  The  facility  with  which  blank  verse  lends  itself 
to  expression  induces  many  men  to  think  that  they  are 
writing  poetry,  and  their  readers  to  believe  that  they 
are  reading  poetry,  when  they  are  only  writing  and 
reading  a  measured  sort  of  prose.  But  in  the  instance 
of  the  lyric  neither  writer  nor  reader  can  become  the 
victim  of  any  such  delusion.  We  have  plenty  of  proof 
of  this  fact  in  the  poem  which  is  inserted  as  an  inter- 
lude between  the  two  parts  of  'Philip  Van  Artevelde,* 

1  R.  C.  Trench's  'Letters,'  A^ol.  I,  p.  159. 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  OF  THE  PERIOD    175 

and  in  the  songs  which  are  scattered  through  that  and 
others  of  his  dramas.  In  a  certain  way  some  of  the 
latter  are  quite  perfect.  They  are  finished  in  more 
senses  than  one.  They  are  frequently  close  imitations 
of  the  songs  found  in  the  plays  of  the  Elizabethan 
dramatists.  But  they  are  palpable  imitations.  The 
element  of  spontaneity  is  entirely  lacking.  The  best 
of  them  are  poems  of  a  very  high  order  of  mediocrity — 
so  high  indeed  that  some  of  them  have  at  times  imposed 
upon  the  trained  judgment — but  out  of  the  region  of 
high  mediocrity  they  never  ascend. 

The  most  striking  evidence  of  the  essentially  prosaic 
quality  of  Tajdor's  mind  is  seen  in  his  autobiography. 
This  is  a  very  remarkable  work  both  for  what  it  says 
and  for  what  it  fails  to  say.  There  are  in  it  the  most 
astounding  revelations  in  regard  to  matters  which 
most  men  are  solicitous  to  keep  to  themselves.  Taylor 
tells  us  of  his  rejection  by  one  woman  to  whom  he 
made  a  proposal  of  marriage.  He  lets  us  know  fur- 
ther of  the  difficulty  he  experienced,  both  from  her- 
self and  her  family,  in  securing  the  woman  whom  he 
eventually  married.  There  are  revelations  of  feelings 
about  himself  and  his  writings  which  are  remarkable 
for  nothing  so  much  as  for  the  display  they  make  of 
the  most  egregious  and  unblushing  vanity.  Such  feel- 
ings are  not  peculiar.  Nor  are  they  reprehensible,  so 
long  as  they  are  kept  to  one's  self;  but  in  the  vast 
majority  of  cases  the  man  seeks  in  time  to  hide  them 
even  from  his  own  consciousness,  if  in  truth  they  have 
not  been  beaten  out  of  him  by  the  friction  and  conflicts 
which  he  comes  to  have  with  his  fellow  men. 


176  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

But  even  more  striking  in  this  autobiography  is  what 
Taylor  did  not  put  in.  During  the  course  of  his  life 
he  was  brought  into  contact  with  some  of  the  most 
eminent  men  of  his  time.  Several  of  them  he  knew 
intimately.  He  must  have  come  to  be  acquainted  with 
much  that  the  world  would  have  been  glad  to  hear  and 
remember.  But  though  their  names  flit  across  his 
pages,  they  do  not  enliven  them.  We  are  told  in  sev- 
eral instances  of  the  wise  sayings  they  uttered;  but 
none  of  these  wise  sayings  are  preserved.  Something 
might  be  said  in  defence  of  this  course,  if  it  had  been 
due  to  a  determination  to  respect  the  sanctity  of  pri- 
vate conversation.  But  no  such  feeling  existed  on  his 
part.  Many  of  his  pages  are  filled  with  records  and 
remarks  of  men  of  inferior  interest — not  in  all  cases 
because  they  were  inferior  men,  but  because  for  some 
reason  they  have  failed  to  impress  themselves  upon 
their  time  and  their  countrymen.  Furthermore,  he 
gave  up  much  space  to  family  letters,  to  little  events 
in  his  o^vn  career,  to  reflections  upon  his  o^vn  thoughts 
and  feelings— all  of  which,  though  undoubtedly  of 
much  interest  to  himself,  are  usually  of  the  least  con- 
ceivable interest  to  any  other  human  being.  The  truth 
is  that  no  one  ^vith  such  opportunities  to  make  an 
autobiography  entertaining  could  have  struggled  with 
much  more  success  to  make  it  dull. 

During  the  period  of  transition,  Taylor  was  in  the 
eyes  of  the  highly  cultivated  easily  the  most  command- 
ing figure  in  English  poetry  among  the  younger  writ- 
ers. But  as  regards  popular  appreciation  he  was 
immeasurably  inferior  to  two  authors  who  began  their 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  OF  THE  PERIOD         177 

literary  career  at  about  the  same  time  as  he.  One  of 
them  was  a  Scotch  clergyman  named  Robert  Pollok. 
He  died  in  1827  at  the  age  of  twenty-nine.  This  event 
took  place  a  few  months  after  the  poem  was  published 
which  was  to  achieve  a  success  the  greatest  author  of 
any  age  might  have  envied.  It  was  entitled  'The 
Course  of  Time. '  Its  sale  was  extraordinary.  In  spite 
of  frequent  assertions  to  the  contrary,  the  great  w^ork 
of  Milton  during  the  remaining  years  of  the  century 
which  followed  its  publication  met  with  distinct  favor. 
But  whatever  success  it  gained  pales,  as  regards  gen- 
eral acceptance,  with  the  popularity  which  waited  on 
the  diffuse,  and,  as  a  whole,  the  feeble  poem  of  Pollok. 
First  published  in  the  middle  of  April,  1827,  its  second 
edition  did  not  make  its  appearance  till  January  of  the 
following  year.  This  consisted  of  fifteen  hundred 
copies  which  were  disposed  of  in  a  fortnight.  By  June, 
the  fourth  edition  had  been  sold  out.  In  a  little  more 
than  six  months,  six  thousand  copies  had  found  buyers. 
By  the  close  of  1828,  tw^elve  thousand  copies  had  been 
put  on  the  market.  This  was  the  beginning  of  the 
triumphant  career  it  was  to  run.  Before  the  third  of 
a  century  had  gone  by,  eighty  thousand  copies  had  been 
disposed  of  in  Great  Britain.  The  work  was  received 
with  equal  favor  in  this  country.  Something  of  its 
continued  sale  here  was  due  to  its  being  frequently 
used  in  certain  schools  as  a  text-book  for  parsing — a 
process  which  after  a  fashion  kept  alive  the  poem, 
while  necessarily  destroying  the  vitality  of  what  little 
poetry  it  actually  contained. 

But  great  as  was  the  impression  made  by  Pollok 's 


178  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

work,  so  far  as  the  public  was  concerned,  it  was  not  in 
any  measure  comparable  to  that  produced  by  the 
poetry  of  Eobert  Montgomery.  The  difference  of  con- 
ditions under  which  their  respective  writings  came  out, 
redounded  also  to  the  credit  of  the  latter  author. 
Pollok's  great  success  was  limited  to  a  single  one  of 
his  productions.  But  Montgomery  wrote  no  small 
number  of  poems,  not  one  of  which — certainly  not  one 
of  the  important  pieces — failed  to  pass  through  edition 
after  edition.  As  long  as  his  life  lasted,  his  writings 
showed  no  signs  of  waning  popularity.  Furthermore, 
he  had  not  in  his  favor,  as  did  Pollok,  an  influential 
critic  like  Christopher  North,  who  was  indeed  so  much 
of  a  partisan  as  to  find  fault  more  than  once  with 
Jeffrey  for  not  sharing  in  his  own  enthusiasm  about 
that  author.  Nor  had  he  behind  him  the  support  of  a 
great  publishing  house  like  that  of  *  Blackwood.'  Still 
further,  he  encountered,  what  Pollok  did  not,  a  con- 
stant storm  of  depreciation  and  contemptuous  personal 
abuse  at  a  comparatively  early  period  in  his  career. 
This  came,  too,  from  critical  organs,  then  wielding 
wide  influence.  "With  few  exceptions,  these  heaped 
upon  Montgomery  the  grossest  contumely.  The  prac- 
tice began  with  some  of  the  weeklies  and  was  followed 
at  once  by  certain  monthlies.  The  three  great  and 
presumably  all-powerful  quarterlies  joined  later  in  the 
attack.  His  only  effective  defender  in  the  press  was 
'  The  Literary  Gazette, '  whose  editor  indeed  was  about 
as  great  as  a  critic  as  he  himself  was  great  as  a  poet. 
Yet  all  these  violent  assaults  directed  against  him 
availed  not  a  particle  in  retarding  his   triumphant 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  OF  THE  PERIOD    179 

progress,  so  far  as  that  is  determined  by  the  wide  cir- 
culation of  his  writings.  In  the  hostility  he  encoun- 
tered and  in  its  absolute  ineffectiveness  there  is  noth- 
ing like  his  experience  recorded  in  the  history  of  Eng- 
lish verse.  Hostile  criticism  has  occasionally  been  suc- 
cessful for  a  time  in  delaying  the  reception  of  really 
great  work.  It  was  absolutely  powerless  in  the  case  of 
this  writer  of  inferior  work.  The  story  of  his  life, 
personal  as  well  as  literary,  demands  in  consequence  a 
certain  degree  of  attention,  not  due  at  all  to  the  impor- 
tance of  the  man  or  to  the  value  of  his  productions. 
But  it  is  an  instructive  chapter  in  the  history  of  Eng- 
lish literature ;  for  nowhere  can  be  found  a  more  signal 
example  of  the  futility  of  criticism  to  affect  the  for- 
tunes of  a  popular  favorite. 

Robert  Montgomery  was  born  at  Bath  in  1807.  He 
is  reported  to  have  been  the  natural  son  of  one  Gomery 
who  acted  the  part  of  clown  at  the  theater  in  that  city. 
He  made  up  to  some  extent  for  the  lack  of  legitimacy 
by  prefixing  'Mont'  to  his  father's  name,  thereby 
giving  himself  the  more  aristocratic  appellation  of 
Montgomery.  These  at  least  were  the  statements  con- 
stantly made  by  hostile  critics.  The  boy  acquired  in 
his  school  days  a  reputation  for  ability.  By  the  time 
he  was  twenty  years  old,  he  had  written  and  published 
a  satire  entitled  'The  Age  Reviewed.'  It  came  out  in 
1827,  and  passed  into  a  second  edition,  revised  and 
enlarged,  in  March,  1828.  This  last  year  saw  also  the 
production  of  a  similar  work  entitled  'The  Puffiad.'^ 

1  This  work  is  ordinarily  put  down  as  having  been  published  in  1830. 
It  came  out  at  the  time  here  stated.  It  was  reviewed  in  'The  Literary 
Gazette'  for  May  31,  1828. 


180  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

The  satire  is  remarkable  for  its  denunciation  of  the 
process  by  which  according  to  his  enemies  he  himself 
was  later  to  gain  his  own  reputation.  But  this  work 
which  appeared  in  May  had  been  preceded  by  another 
of  an  entirely  different  character  through  which  he 
sprang  at  once  into  reputation  and  popularity.  This 
was  a  poem  entitled  *  The  Omnipresence  of  the  Deity. ' 
It  came  out  at  the  very  end  of  January,  1828,  when  its 
author  was  only  twenty-one  years  old.  Far  different 
was  its  reception  by  the  critics  from  that  which  had 
waited  upon  his  satires.  '  The  Literary  Gazette '  which 
had  denounced  'The  Age  Reviewed'  as  '' unmitigated 
balderdash"  executed  at  once  a  change  of  front.  It 
greeted  the  work  with  enthusiasm.  In  so  doing,  it 
reflected  a  general  popular  sentiment.  It  admitted 
that  there  were  defects  in  the  poem,  a  feature  incident 
to  the  early  years  of  the  author.  But  these,  it  said, 
were  more  than  atoned  for  by  the  beauty  and  genius 
displayed  in  it  as  a  whole.  These  characteristics 
placed  it  in  the  very  highest  class  of  English  sacred 
poetry.  This  was,  in  fact,  the  view  generally  expressed 
by  the  received  organs  of  public  opinion  which  noticed 
the  work  at  all.  'The  Gentleman's  Magazine'  des- 
canted especially  upon  the  author's  loftiness  of  style. 
''His  language,"  it  said,  "rises  into  a  sublimity  par- 
taking of  inspiration."  It  had  no  hesitation  in  assert- 
ing that  by  the  strength  of  its  own  great  merit  the 
work  had  "ranked  itself  among  the  permanent  litera- 
ture of  the  nation,  in  whose  language  it  will  be  immor- 
tal." So  general  was  this  chorus  of  laudation,  so 
steadily  did  it  continue,  that  Christopher  North,  the 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  OF  THE  PERIOD    181 

reigning  critic  of  'Black^vood's  Magazine,'  felt  called 
upon  to  consider  the  pretensions  of  this  new  claimant 
for  the  highest  of  poetical  honors.  In  the  number  for 
May,  1828,  he  devoted  more  than  twenty  pages  to  a 
review  of  the  poem  which,  while  not  enthusiastic,  was 
not  condemnatory. 

Many  works  have  met  with  this  chorus  of  eulogy 
which  never  appealed  to  a  wide  public  in  the  matter  of 
circulation.  '  Philip  Van  Artevelde '  is  a  case  in  point. 
It  was  hailed  with  perhaps  even  louder  acclaim  than 
this  poem  of  Montgomery's;  but  far  different  was  the 
sale  of  the  latter.  Published  late  in  January,  1828,  a 
second  edition  followed  in  March,  a  third  in  April,  a 
fourth  in  May,  a  fifth  in  July,  a  sixth  in  August,  and  a 
seventh  in  October.  It  might  be  supposed  that  a  sale 
so  enormous  would  satisfy  all  possible  demands,  espe- 
cially as  in  October  of  this  same  year  another  volume 
of  religious  poems  in  blank  verse  made  its  appearance 
from  the  same  prolific  pen.  This  one,  whose  first  piece 
was  entitled  'The  Universal  Prayer,'  was  expensively 
printed  in  quarto  "^^ith  a  portrait  of  the  poet  to  meet 
the  demand  of  his  admirers.  In  a  few  weeks  a  cheaper 
edition  in  octavo  followed  in  order  to  satisfy  the  crav- 
ings of  the  general  public  for  the  intellectual  and  spir- 
itual nutriment  it  contained.  But  the  rivalry  of  the 
later  work  did  not  interfere  with  the  success  of  the 
earlier.  In  January,  1829,  'The  Omnipresence  of  the 
Deity'  had  passed  into  an  eighth  edition,  and  in  August 
of  that  same  year  into  a  ninth.  The  second  poem,  too, 
held  its  own  with  the  first  and  had  almost  as  ^ide  a 
sale.    It  was  a  source  of  peculiar  gratification  to  cer- 


182  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

tain  literary  critics,  in  felicitating  themselves  upon  the 
fact  that  they  had  been  the  first  to  welcome  the  dawn- 
ing of  genius,  to  note  that  the  public  taste  had  now 
ratified  their  o^vn.  Only  a  little  later  they  were  enabled 
to  announce  that  Mr.  Eobert  Montgomery,  who  at  so 
early  an  age  had  made  so  powerful  an  impression  in 
the  highest  range  of  sacred  poetry,  had  in  the  press  a 
new  work.  At  the  very  end  of  the  year  it  was  pub- 
lished. It  was  a  poem  in  blank  verse,  and  entitled 
*  Satan,  or  Intellect  without  God.'  In  this  work,  the 
archenemy  of  mankind  was  represented  as  taking  his 
seat  on  the  top  of  a  high  mountain.  From  that  point 
of  vantage  he  contemplated  the  universe  and  gave 
expression  to  a  series  of  reflections  inspired  by  what 
he  saw  and  what  he  felt.  But  there  was  nothing 
Satanic  about  this  Satan.  His  utterances  were  in  gen- 
eral unobjectionable,  if  indeed,  they  might  not  be  called 
praiseworthy.  A  public  which,  a  few  years  before, 
had  been  shocked  beyond  expression  by  Byron,  who  in 
his  'Cain'  had  made  the  devil  talk  like  the  devil,  was 
delighted  beyond  measure  in  having  him  discourse 
very  much  after  the  manner  of  the  superintendent  of 
a  Sunday  school. 

Up  to  this  time,  Montgomery  had  had  everything  his 
own  way.  His  two  volumes  of  religious  poetry  had 
met  with  a  sale  w^hich  might  be  justly  called  phenome- 
nal. Furthermore,  so  far  as  the  leading  critical  peri- 
odicals of  all  sorts  were  concerned,  they  had  either 
spoken  warmly  in  his  favor  or  had  said  nothing  in  his 
dispraise.  His  third  religious  work  had  been  received 
by  his  admirers  with  even  greater  enthusiasm  than 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  OF  THE  PERIOD         183 

that  which  had  marked  the  reception  of  the  two  pre- 
vious volumes.  The  staid  and  serious  'Gentleman's 
Magazine,'  for  instance,  declared  that  the  new  poem 
abounded  in  passages  of  beauty  and  sublimity  which 
had  few  parallels  in  modern  times.  The  reviewer,  in 
truth,  was  left  in  a  state  of  stupefaction  by  the  con- 
templation of  the  greatness  of  the  author.  ''When  we 
think  of  the  youth  of  Mr.  Montgomery,"  he  wrote,  "we 
stand  amazed  at  the  height  to  which  his  genius  and 
talents  have  raised  him.  There  is  a  vigour  of  mind 
and  a  maturity  of  thought  and  intellect, — a  moral 
daring  united  to  the  finest  perception  of  all  that  is 
refined  and  delicate  in  taste,  exciting  at  once  our  sur- 
prise and  admiration."^ 

But  the  critical  knives  that  had  been  sharpening  for 
this  favorite  of  the  public  now  proceeded  to  get  in  their 
work.  Success  so  pronounced  would  have  been  cer- 
tain to  provoke  envy  and  jealousy,  even  had  it  been 
fully  merited.  The  reaction  against  the  ridiculous 
laudation  of  which  Montgomery  had  been  the  recipient, 
speedily  showed  itself  in  the  corresponding  form  of 
excessive  vituperation.  Some  time  before,  there  had 
indeed  been  ominous  indications  of  the  coming  change 
of  attitude.  But  it  was  not  till  the  publication  of 
'Satan'  that  the  long-gathering  storm  burst  in  its  fury. 
The  onslaught  upon  the  poet  was  made  from  every 
conceivable  quarter.  Critical  missiles  were  directed 
against  him  in  periodical  after  periodical,  from  the 
light-armed  weeklies  to  the  hea\^-armed  quarterlies. 
The  attack  was  begun  by  'The  Athenaeum'  which  had 

1  'Gentleman's  Magazine,'  January,  1830,  Vol.  C,  p.  45. 


184  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

previously  been  warm  in  his  praise.  It  had  now  under- 
gone a  change  of  ownership  and  with  it  a  change  of 
view.  After  speaking  of  the  two  previous  religious 
poems  as  harmless  trash,  it  described  the  new  volume 
as  a  wretched  production,  full  of  unknown  and  unne- 
cessary words,  bad  grammar,  unmeaning  nonsense  and 
rigmarole,  and  summarily  characterized  its  author  as 
''unpoetical,  unlearned,  unreasonable,  and  ungram- 
matical,  with  nothing  positive  about  him  but  his  arro- 
gance and  self-conceit.'"  This  appeared  near  the 
middle  of  January.  Towards  the  end  of  the  same 
month,  it  was  followed  by  a  similar  review  in  'The 
Atlas.'  This  weekly  described  Montgomery's  'Satan' 
as  a  good-natured,  long-winded,  and  highly  fanciful 
person  who  selects  for  the  sake  of  contrast  one  of  the 
coldest  seats  in  the  universe  and  delivers  a  long  speech 
in  which  he  discusses  in  maudlin  English  all  the  known 
and  unknown  conditions  of  our  nature.  He  is  repre- 
sented as  being  altogether  above  the  restraints  of 
grammar,  and  as  having  an  unmeasured  contempt  for 
the  received  meanings  of  words ;  as  a  sort  of  amende 
honorable  for  the  treatment  of  those  now  in  existence 
he  coins  a  number  of  new  ones  that  never  had  any 
currency  outside  of  his  own  special  dominions.  A 
little  later  a  northern  periodical  charged  him  with 
vagueness  and  bombast,  musty  morality,  and  trite 
sublimity.^ 

Two  monthlies  followed  in  even  a  more  violent  strain 
of  disparagement.    One  was  the  old  '  Monthly  Review,  '^ 

1  January  24,  1830. 

2  '  Edinburgh  Literary  Journal, '  February  13,  1830. 
s  February,  1830. 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  OF  THE  PERIOD         185 

which  was  now  approaching  the  end  of  the  century  of 
its  existence.  The  article  appearing  in  it  was  devoted 
to  two  favorites  of  the  public,  Letitia  Landon  and 
Eobert  Montgomery.  That  part  of  it  directed  against 
the  latter  attacked  particularly  the  system  of  puffing 
him  and  his  soaring  Miltonic  genius  which  it  declared 
had  been  resorted  to  in  order  to  bolster  up  his  repu- 
tation and  to  increase  the  circulation  of  his  works. 
In  this  matter  it  anticipated  what  Macaulay  was  to 
say  somewhat  later,  and  said  it  much  more  effectively. 
But  '  The  Monthly  Review '  was  no  longer  what  it  was 
in  the  eighteenth  century,  a  power  in  the  land.  A  far 
more  persistent  and  thoroughly  abusive  assailant  was 
'Fraser's  Magazine'  which  had  just  been  set  on  foot, 
and  surpassed  even  'Blackwood's'  in  the  abounding 
vigor  of  its  blackguardism.  In  its  very  first  number, 
it  fell  foul  of  the  poem  of  'Satan.'  "We  have  been 
bothered  and  stunned,"  it  began,  "with  the  brawling 
and  brajdng  of  Arcadian  nightingales  in  praise  of  the 
sacred  poetry  of  young  Montgomery. ' '  It  was  in  this 
urbane  way  that  the  review  opened  and  the  remainder 
of  the  article  was  in  accord  with  its  beginning.  From 
that  time  on  for  a  series  of  years,  few  are  the  numbers 
of  this  liveliest  and  roughest  of  periodicals  in  which 
there  was  not  some  sneering  reference  to  the  work  of 
Montgomery  as  a  poet  or  to  vituperation  of  him  as  a 
man.  In  one  of  them  he  was  included  -with  Bulwer 
and  Alaric  Watts — two  favorite  objects  of  aversion  to 
the  then  conductors  of  the  periodical — among  ' '  snakes, 
rats,  and  other  vermin. ' '  On  another  occasion  he  was 
termed  "Holy  Bob,"  and  in  still  another  "a  rhyming 


186  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

monkey."  To  distinguish  him  from  his  veteran  con- 
temporary James  Montgomery,  he  was  christened 
'Satan  Montgomery' — and  the  name  elmig  to  him  for 
a  long  series  of  years. 

It  was  now  the  turn  of  the  quarterlies.  Of  these  the 
'Westminster'  first  discussed  the  pretensions  of  the 
poet.  Its  review — which  appeared  in  the  number  for 
April,  1830 — remains  the  most  entertaining  of  any 
produced,  partly  because  it  was  the  politest.  It  was 
the  fashion  of  the  day,  it  asserted,  to  make  biography 
the  work  of  friendship.  Campbell  writes  the  life  of 
the  painter  Lawrence,  Moore  that  of  Lord  Byron, 
Eobert  Montgomery,  in  accordance  with  this  practice, 
naturally  takes  as  his  subject  Satan.  The  orthodoxy 
of  the  'Westminster'  did  not  stand  high,  and  there  was 
in  this  criticism  apparently  something  of  that  pitying 
feeling  towards  the  arch-fiend  which  led  the  Christian 
father  Origen  to  hope  that  the  devil  himself  might  at 
last  be  saved.  "As  Milton,"  it  continued,  "may  be 
read  in  Heaven  so  this  is  precisely  the  book  fit  for 
Hades,  and  though  we  trust  we  hate  the  Enemy  as 
vehemently  as  all  good  Christians  ought  to  hate  him, 
yet  we  own  we  wish  him  no  worse  than  a  patient  peru- 
sal of  this  work  to  his  honor.  He  will  here  bathe  in  a 
stream  of  molten  lead."  The  criticism  in  the  'Quar- 
terly' was  delayed  for  some  years.  Even  then  it  did 
not  take  the  shape  of  a  formal  review  but  character- 
istically went  out  of  its  way  to  make  a  malignant  per- 
sonal attack  upon  Montgomery  in  a  footnote  which  was 
fairly  dragged  into  a  notice  of  a  fashionable  novel.^ 

1 '  Quarterly  Eeview, '  Vol.  LII,  p.  491,  November,  1834. 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  OF  THE  PERIOD    187 

The  now  far  more  noted  article  by  Macaulay  in  the 
'Edinburgh'  needs  the  fuller  consideration  which  is 
to  be  given  later;  for  about  it  and  the  influence  it 
exerted  at  the  time  of  its  appearance  the  most  erro- 
neous assertions  still  continue  to  be  made. 

But  the  enemies  of  Montgomery  did  not  by  any 
means  have  things  all  their  own  way.  If  he  had  his 
detractors,  he  had  also  his  defenders  and  admirers. 
There  were  many  of  these,  and  several  of  the  many 
were  influential.  This  was  true  of  both  individuals  and 
of  the  periodical  press.  Pamphlets  were  written  in 
his  favor  attacking  his  critics  and  asserting  in  fullest 
sincerity  that  the  author  of  'Satan'  was  the  coming 
man  destined  to  occupy  the  throne  of  letters.  These 
partisans  of  the  past  inveighed  earnestly  against  the 
notoriously  jealous  criticism  which,  they  declared,  had 
sought  to  rob  him  of  his  reputation  and  the  individual 
scurrility  to  which  he  had  been  subjected.  There  was 
ground,  too,  for  their  thinking  lightly  of  the  critical 
judgment  of  those  who  were  foremost  in  decrying  their 
idol.  Rarely  was  the  poetical  taste  of  his  depredators 
so  flawless  that  it  behooved  the  reader  to  pay  heed 
to  the  dicta  they  promulgated.  They  at  times  went 
into  raptures  over  productions  as  marvellous  and 
indisputable  works  of  genius  of  which  nobody  knows 
now  even  the  names.  Criticism  that  could  deal  in 
vagaries  of  this  sort  was  not  likely  to  shake  the  con- 
fidence of  even  the  uncritical  admirers  of  Mont- 
gomery. Their  belief,  too,  in  his  greatness  was  sup- 
ported by  the  public  of  readers,  or  what  for  him  was 
better,  the  public  of  purchasers.     All  the  censure  of 


188  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

the  poetry,  all  the  vituperation  of  the  man  had  not  the 
slightest  effect  in  retarding  the  sale  of  his  work.  One 
indeed  gets  the  impression  that  they  increased  it.  No 
writer  of  verse  during  the  period  of  transition,  and  we 
might  add  during  the  whole  period  Montgomery  lived, 
remotely  rivalled  him  in  popularity,  so  far  as  that  is 
determined  by  the  number  of  volumes  sold.  His  works 
were  brought  out  in  collected  editions.  Selections 
from  his  poetry  were  made  for  the  use  of  schools. 
Never  has  the  powerlessness  of  critical  attack  been 
manifested  more  conspicuously.  ''Who  doffed  the 
lion's  hide,"  asked  loftily  'Eraser's  Magazine'  in 
1831,  "from  Mountebank  Montgomery  and  hung  a 
calf-skin  on  his  recreant  limbs  which  he  must  wear 
forever?"  But  the  very  next  year  it  was  forced  to 
confess  the  futility  of  its  efforts.  ''Robert  Mont- 
gomery's Omnipresence  of  the  Deity/'  it  said  in  De- 
cember, 1832,  "has  supplanted  Paradise  Lost  in  vari- 
ous academies  in  England.  So  much  for  the  march  of 
intellect. ' ' 

Nor  was  Montgomery's  literary  activity  checked  in 
the  slightest  by  the  hostile  criticism  he  received.  For 
the  years  immediately  following  what  might  almost  be 
called  an  organized  assault  on  the  part  of  the  greater 
portion  of  the  periodical  press  he  continued  to  produce 
a  number  of  poems,  all  of  which  were  uniformly  suc- 
cessful as  regards  their  reception  by  the  public.  One 
of  them  entitled  'The  Messiah'  came  out  in  May,  1832, 
"dedicated  by  permission  to  her  Majesty  the  Queen." 
It  was  received  with  enthusiasm  by  his  devotees.  So 
rapid  was  the  sale  and  so  great  was  the  demand  that 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  OF  THE  PERIOD         189 

the  publishers  were  obliged  to  announce  in  the  follow- 
ing month  that  a  new  edition  would  be  brought  out  as 
soon  as  possible.  Early  in  July  they  gave  notice  that 
it  would  be  ready  at  a  fixed  date,  and  to  ob\date  dis- 
appointment intending  purchasers  were  requested  to 
make  immediate  application  for  the  work  to  their 
respective  booksellers.  In  October  followed  the  third 
edition,  in  August  of  the  follo^ving  year  a  fourth,  and 
a  little  later  a  separate  edition  was  advertised  to  be 
issued  under  the  title  of  '  The  Sacred  Annual. '  It  was 
illustrated  by  colored  and  highly  finished  facsimiles  of 
original  pictures  of  the  first  excellence  painted  ex- 
pressly for  the  purpose  by  the  most  distinguished 
living  artists  such  as  Etty,  Martin,  Haydon,  Yon  Hoist, 
and  Maclise.  This  work,  gorgeously  bound  and  sold  at 
a  high  price,  led  to  a  bestowal  upon  the  poet  of  a  medal 
by  the  Queen  mth  her  picture  upon  one  side  and  that 
of  the  King  upon  the  other.  This  was  not  the  only 
instance  of  royal  recognition  which  Montgomery  re- 
ceived during  his  career.  As  late  as  1849  another  work 
of  his,  entitled  'The  Christian  Life,  a  Manual  of 
Sacred  Verse,'  was  published.  It  was  ''inscribed  by 
express  permission  to  her  most  gracious  Majesty." 
This  work,  like  'The  Messiah,'  passed  rapidly  through 
several  editions. 

As  might  perhaps  be  expected,  the  attacks  directed 
against  Montgomery  made  as  little  impression  upon 
him  personally  as  they  did  upon  the  public.  Had  he 
weakly  yielded  to  the  hostile  criticism  he  evoked,  and 
had  he  been  led  to  remain  silent  as  subsequently  was 
Tennyson,  his  repute  as  a  writer  of  verse  would  have 


190  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

speedily  come  to  an  ignominious  close;  for  there  was 
nothing  in  what  he  produced  to  impart  to  it  vitality, 
outside  of  the  immediate  favor  of  the  public.  But  he 
was  not  in  the  slightest  degree  affected  by  the  critical 
storm  which  had  burst  upon  his  head.  He  was  and 
continued  to  be  serenely  confident  in  his  own  greatness 
and  had  nothing  but  compassion  or  contempt  for  his 
detractors.  As  all  the  hostile  criticism  lavished  upon 
his  writings  had  not  the  slightest  influence  in  lessening 
his  popularity  with  the  public,  he  felt  justified  in 
assuming  an  exultant  and  even  a  patronizing  tone  in 
dealing  with  his  assailants.  In  the  text  of  his  poem  of 
'Oxford,'  but  more  particularly  in  the  notes,  he  com- 
mented on  Macaulay  in  a  way  the  latter  apparently 
never  forgave.  He  spoke  of  him  as  "the  hired  assas- 
sin of  a  bigoted  review. ' '  A  remark  which  strikes  us 
now  as  deliciously  absurd  occurs  at  the  end  of  one  of 
his  notes.  "The  reviewer,"  he  said,  "is,  we  believe, 
still  alive ;  and  from  time  to  time  employs  himself  in 
making  mouths  at  distinguished  men." 

Montgomery  indeed  would  have  been  a  singular 
young  writer  if  his  head  had  not  been  turned  by  his 
sudden  and  extraordinary  and  continuous  success. 
There  is  no  doubt  that  his  head  was  turned  and  that 
it  never  re-turned  to  a  normal  position.  To  a  certain 
extent  also  he  was  justified  by  the  estimate  of  various 
persons  in  the  opinion  he  entertained  of  himself. 
The  admiration  he  excited  was  by  no  means  confined 
to  the  members  of  the  vast  multitude  who  are  num- 
bered but  not  weighed,  though  it  was  in  its  ranks  that 
his  poetry  had  mainly  its  circulation.     Some  of  the 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  OF  THE  PERIOD         191 

periodicals  Avhich  celebrated  his  merits  occupied  a 
high  position  in  the  critical  world.  Several  of  the 
persons  who  stood  up  for  him  were  men  of  letters 
whose  names  carried  respect  anywhere  and  every- 
where. Sharon  Turner  and  William  Lisle  Bowles 
were  from  the  outset  his  friends  and  patrons. 
Southey,  while  not  joining  in  the  unmeasured  lauda- 
tion heaped  upon  him,  had  no  mean  opinion  of  his 
abilities  and  achievements.  Nor  was  Wordsworth's 
estimate  unfavorable.  He  had  read,  he  wrote  to 
Montgomery,  'The  Omnipresence  of  the  Deity'  with 
much  pleasure,  and  while  recognizing  its  faults,  he 
saw  also  in  the  work  indication  of  future  excellence. 
Those  who  are  familiar  with  the  somewhat  ponderous 
history  of  Europe  written  by  Sir  Archibald  Alison 
may  recall  that  in  one  place  he  mentions  ''the  noble 
poem  of  Satan." 

But  no  measured  and  lukewarm  praise  of  this  sort 
would  have  satisfied  the  feelings  of  his  partisans. 
They  looked  upon  Montgomery  as  a  mighty  intellectual 
luminary  that  had  suddenly  blazed  forth  with  a 
splendor  all  its  own.  It  was  with  them  no  unusual 
subject  of  congratulation  that  he  had  come  to  take  the 
place  made  vacant  by  the  death  of  Byron.  As  the 
latter  author  had  in  their  opinion  given  up  his  great 
gifts  to  the  service  of  the  devil,  they  felt  that  his  evil 
influence  should  be  counteracted  by  furnishing  the 
fullest  development  to  the  powers  of  another  author, 
equal  if  not  greater,  who  was  possessed  not  only  of 
genius  but  of  piety,  and  was  furthermore  disposed  to 
devote  himself  to  the  service  of  the  Lord.     Accord- 


192  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

ingly  measures  were  taken  by  certain  of  his  admirers — 
among  whom  were  tw^o  of  the  earliest  sponsors  of 
his  reputation,  Sharon  Turner  and  William  Lisle 
Bowles — to  have  his  education  continued  and  com- 
pleted. In  February,  1830,  he  was  matriculated  at 
Lincoln  College,  Oxford,  and  in  1833  received  the 
degree  of  A.  B.  He  entered  the  church.  Though  he 
never  gave  up  to  the  end  of  his  life  the  production  of 
poetry,  he  was  largely  diverted  from  its  composition 
by  the  duties  of  the  new  calling  he  had  chosen.  Yet 
not  one  of  the  works  he  subsequently  brought  out 
failed  to  meet  \vith  favor  from  the  public  of  purchasers. 
Nor  did  the  sale  of  the  poems  which  had  previously 
appeared  fall  off  while  his  life  lasted,  or  even  some- 
what later.  In  1841  appeared,  for  instance,  the 
twenty-first  edition  of  'The  Omnipresence  of  the 
Deity,'  in  1849,  the  twenty-fifth.  In  the  catalogue  of 
the  British  Museum  is  the  twenty-eighth,  and  it  bears 
the  date  of  1858,  three  years  after  its  author 's  death. 

Full  as  remarkable  too  was  his  success  in  the  new 
calling  he  had  chosen.  After  filling  the  pulpit  success- 
fully in  two  provincial  cities,  he  came  to  London  in 
1843  as  the  minister  of  Percy  Chapel  in  the  parish  of 
Saint  Pancras.  There  he  ofiiciated  the  rest  of  his  life. 
Wherever  he  was,  he  seems  to  have  been  as  popular 
as  a  preacher  of  sermons  as  he  was  as  a  writer  of  verse. 
There  is  a  striking  comment  on  this  fact  in  a  letter 
from  Miss  Barrett  to  Richard  Hengist  Home.  ''Are 
you  aware,  0  Orion,"  she  wrote,  "that  the  most 
popular  poet  alive  is  the  Reverend  Robert  Mont- 
gomery, who  walks  into  his  twenty  and  somethingth 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  OF  THE  PERIOD         193 

edition  'like  nothing'?  I  mean  the  author  of  'Satan,' 
'Woman,'  'Omnipresence  of  the  Deity,'  'The  Messiah'; 
the  least  of  these  being  in  its  teens  of  editions,  and  the 
greatest  not  worth  a  bark  of  my  Flushie's.  .  .  .  But 
is  it  not  wonderful  that  this  man  who  waves  his  white 
handkerchief  from  the  pulpit  till  the  tears  run  in 
ri^^llets  all  round,  should  have  another  trick  of  oratory 
(as  good)  where  he  can't  show  the  ring  on  his  little 
finger?  I  really  do  believe  that  the  'Omnipresence  of 
the  Deity'  is  in  the  twenty-fourth  edition,  or  beyond 
it, — a  fact  that  cannot  be  stated  in  respect  to  Words- 
worth after  all  these  years.  "^ 

Yet  in  spite  of  the  phenomenal  favor  of  the  reading 
public  which  waited  upon  Montgomery  from  the  very 
beginning  of  his  literary  career  to  the  very  end  of  his 
life,  his  name  would  have  disappeared  as  utterly  from 
the  knowledge  of  all  men  as  it  has  from  that  of  most, 
had  it  not  been  preserved  in  a  sort  of  quasi-vitality  by 
an  attack  in  '  The  Edinburgh  Review'  intended  to  crush 
him  entirely.  This  was  the  criticism  by  Macaulay. 
Had  it  not  been  for  that  article,  both  the  man  and  his 
work  would  have  passed  away  as  completely  from 
human  memory  as  have  the  names  and  works  of 
several  others  who  have  attained  to  something  like 
the  same  temporary  popularity  but  who  have  dropped 
quietly  into  the  oblivion  which  sooner  or  later  waits 
upon  all  inferior  production,  though  encountering  no 
assault  from  any  quarter  carrying  weight.  Of  the 
innumerable  attacks  made  upon  Montgomery  this  is 

1  '  Letters    of    Elizabeth    Barrett    Browning,    addressed    to    Eichard 
Hengist  Home,'  1877,  Vol.  I,  pp.  91-92. 


194  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

the  single  one  which  has  survived ;  and  it  has  survived 
not  because  of  its  merits  but  because  it  has  been 
included  in  the  collected  edition  of  the  author's  essays. 
It  is  the  popularity  of  these  other  writings  which  have 
given  to  it  a  reputation  for  effectiveness  which  it  did 
not  have  at  that  time  and  never  deserved  at  any  time. 
Of  itself  it  had  no  claim  to  be  reprinted.  It  is  not 
merely  inferior  to  most  of  the  other  similar  but  now 
forgotten  attacks  which  had  previously  been  published, 
it  is  so  unfair  in  its  criticism  and  so  misleading  in  its 
statements  as  to  be  discreditable  to  its  author. 
Macaulay  to  be  sure,  in  writing  it,  was  actuated  by 
the  noblest  of  motives — at  least  he  tells  us  so.  They 
are  given  in  a  letter  sent  by  him  in  March,  1830,  to  the 
editor  of  'The  Edinburgh  Keview. '  ''There  is,"  he 
said,  "a  wretched  poetaster  of  the  name  of  Robert 
Montgomery,  who  has  written  some  volumes  of  detest- 
able verses  on  religious  subjects,  which,  by  mere  pufifing 
in  magazines  and  newspapers,  have  had  an  immense 
sale.  ...  I  have  for  some  time  past  thought  that  the 
trick  of  puffing,  as  it  is  now  practised  both  by  authors 
and  publishers,  is  likely  to  degrade  the  literary 
character,  and  to  deprave  the  public  taste  in  a  fright- 
ful degree."^  It  was  high  time,  he  thought,  to  purify 
literature  by  exposing  the  methods  by  which  worthless 
works  succeeded  in  securing  an  extensive  circulation. 
He  therefore  suggested  that  an  attempt  should  be 
made  to  try  what  effect  satire  would  have  upon  this 
nuisance.     Accordingly  in  the  April  number  of  'The 

1  Macvey  Napier's  'Correspondence,'  1879,  pp.  79-80. 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  OF  THE  PERIOD         195 

Edinburgh  Eeview  '^ — which  however  did  not  come  out 
till  the  latter  part  of  May — Macaulay  set  out  to  purify 
the  public  taste  in  an  article  entitled  'Mr.  Robert 
Montgomery's  Poems  and  the  Modern  Practice  of 
Puffing.' 

A  temporate  protest  against  the  absurd  estimate 
which  had  been  expressed  in  numerous  quarters  of 
Montgomery's  poetic  achievement  would  not  have 
been  out  of  place,  if  it  were  deemed  desirable  to  write 
anything  at  all  about  works  which  were  destined 
ultimately  to  sink  of  themselves  into  oblivion.  But 
such  a  protest  was  not  likely  to  come  from  that  quar- 
ter. Macaulay 's  article,  as  was  to  be  expected,  was 
marked  by  his  usual  exaggerated  emphasis.  But  what 
was  much  worse,  it  was  disfigured  by  a  series  of  mis- 
statements of  the  methods  w^hich  had  been  followed 
in  this  case  both  by  author  and  publisher.  His  line 
of  reasoning,  or  rather  of  assertion,  to  account  for 
Montgomery's  extraordinary  success  ran  essentially 
to  the  following  effect.  Men  of  letters  had  once  been 
wont  to  court  the  favor  of  patrons  by  flattery.  Now 
they  sought  to  gain  the  favor  of  the  public  by  means 
of  puffing.  He  set  out  to  show  the  various  ways  in 
which  this  nefarious  practice  of  foisting  candidates 
upon  the  favor  of  readers  was  carried  on.  It  was 
primarily  a  sort  of  conspiracy  between  authors  and 
publishers.  By  various  devices  duly  enumerated  they 
sought  to  gull  the  public.  As  the  best  illustration  of 
the  practice  generally  employed  at  that  time  he 
selected  the  writings  of  Robert  Montgomery  ''because 

1  Vol.  LI,  pp.  193-210. 


196  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

his  works  have  received  more  enthusiastic  praise, 
and  have  deserved  more  unmixed  contempt,  than 
any  which,  as  far  as  our  knowledge  extends,  have 
appeared  within  the  last  three  or  four  years."  He 
then  proceeded  to  select  extracts  from  the  two  poems 
under  review — 'The  Omnipresence  of  the  Deity'  and 
'Satan' — to  confirm  the  truth  of  his  assertions.  He 
somewhat  grandiloquently  closed  his  article  with  the 
declaration  that  if  his  remarks  gave  pain  to  Mr. 
Robert  Montgomery  he  was  sorry  for  it ;  but  at  what- 
ever cost  of  pain  to  individuals  literature  must  be 
purified  from  this  taint  of  puffing.  Not  to  be  outdone 
in  generosity,  Montgomery,  in  his  comments  upon  this 
review  in  the  notes  to  his  poem  of  'Oxford,'  expressed 
regret  if  his  remarks  should  cause  Macaulay  any 
suffering. 

Literature  in  the  long  run  can  safely  be  left  to  take 
care  of  itself.  To  whatever  cause  Montgomery's 
success  is  to  be  attributed,  the  reasons  given  for  it  by 
Macaulay  had  not  the  slightest  foundation  in  fact,  so 
far  as  this  poet  was  concerned,  even  were  they  true 
in  the  case  of  other  writers.  His  publisher,  Samuel 
Maunder,  himself  a  compiler  of  educational  works, 
was,  if  all  accessible  information  can  be  trusted,  a 
man  of  upright  character.  Furthermore,  while  he  was 
a  respectable,  he  was  far  from  being  an  influential 
man  in  his  profession.  Naturally  he  felt  outraged  by 
the  charges  and  insinuations  which  had  been  brought 
against  him  from  various  quarters ;  in  particular  that 
Montgomery's  popularity  was  due  to  skilful  and  per- 
sistent  puffing   on   his   part,   carefully   planned   and 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  OF  THE  PERIOD    197 

diligently  carried  out.  He  speedily  made  an  indignant 
and  effective  reply  in  an  'Address  to  the  Public.'^  It 
was  evidently  aimed  mainly  at  Macaulay;  but  he 
neglected  none  of  the  various  accusations  which  had 
been  preferred  by  other  critics.  He  began  with  the 
assertion  that  the  most  illiberal  attacks  had  of  late 
been  repeatedly  directed  against  him  by  certain  review- 
ers, who  in  their  zeal  to  destroy  the  popularity  of 
Montgomery  and  in  their  attempts  to  account  for  the 
extensive  sale  of  his  poems  had  charged  his  publisher 
mth  having  unduly  raised  that  author  into  general 
favor  by  a  system  of  puffing.  He  then  took  up  the 
consideration  of  the  various  statements  which  had 
been  specifically  set  forth  to  sustain  this  accusation. 
The  system  of  puffing,  Maunder  observed,  had  been 
defined  as  resting  on  four  grounds.  First,  the  pub- 
lisher had  his  own  review.  Secondly,  he  exchanged 
favors  with  other  reviews.  Thirdly,  he  influenced 
public  opinion  through  the  agency  of  literary  coteries. 
Fourthly,  he  bribed  the  periodical  press.  All  these, 
he  declared  to  be,  so  far  as  he  was  concerned,  "a 
deliberate  and  malicious  calumny."  The  proof  of 
this  fact  which  he  gave  was  overwhelmingly  conclusive. 
First,  he  said  he  had  no  review  of  his  own.  Conse- 
quently he  could  not  exchange  favors  with  other 
reviews,  and  should  disdain  to  do  so  if  he  could.  He 
furthermore  had  no  connection  with  any  coterie.  As 
to  the  final  charge,  he  remarked  that  he  had  no  money 
to  bribe  periodicals  ^vith,  assuming  that  they  could 
be  bribed,  which  he  did  not  believe.    He  said  indeed 

1' Literary  Gazette,'  August  14,  1830,  p.  534. 


198  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

specifically  with  some  heat  that  he  had  **  never  bribed, 
or  paid,  or  offered  to  pay,  any  individual  connected 
mth  the  periodical  press,  to  praise  the  works  of  Mr. 
Montgomery,  or  any  other  works"  in  which  he 
had  an  interest.  That  any  reputable  or  influential 
periodical  was  open  to  such  inducements  to  sell  its 
praise  or  blame  was  to  him  in  truth  inconceivable. 
In  conclusion,  he  denounced  as  a  gross  abuse  of  criti- 
cism the  attempt  which  had  been  made  to  damage  his 
property  and  impugn  his  conduct  on  grounds,  which, 
to  use  his  own  words,  were  *'at  once  malicious,  scan- 
dalous, and  false. ' '  Macaulay  as  one  of  the  assailants 
was  wise  enough  but  also  disingenuous  enough  to  take 
advantage  of  his  position  in  life  never  to  reply  to 
the  exposure  of  his  unsupported  accusation.  But 
he  never  mthdrew  it:  in  fact,  by  reprinting  this 
article  in  his  collected  essays,  he  may  be  said  to  have 
reaffirmed  it. 

There  was  hardly  need  for  any  protest  on  the  part 
of  the  publisher  in  the  eyes  of  any  fair-minded  person 
acquainted  with  the  facts.  Here  was  a  young  man 
who  had  barely  reached  his  majority.  He  was  a 
dweller  in  a  provincial  city.  He  was  of  mean,  not  to 
say  base  parentage.  When  he  produced  his  first  works 
he  had  none  of  the  advantages  of  university  training 
or  association.  He  had  no  connection  with  men  of 
influence,  no  interest  with  them  beyond  what  their 
personal  opinion  of  his  abilities  might  excite.  His 
publisher  was  equally  powerless  to  help  him  forward 
in  his  career.  To  this  new  aspirant  belonged  not  a 
single  one  of  the  external  agencies  which  aid  an  author 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  OF  THE  PERIOD         199 

in  the  first  instance  to  rise,  many  of  which  were  con- 
spicuously present  in  the  case  of  his  most  virulent 
assailants.  Yet  his  first  religious  poem  was  received 
^vith  enthusiastic  acclaim  by  a  body  of  professional 
critics,  few  if  any  of  whom  could  have  known  him  per- 
sonally, or  even  have  heard  of  him ;  or  if  they  knew  of 
him,  what  they  knew  had  not  been  of  a  nature  to  lead 
them  to  think  of  him  favorably.  The  mere  recital 
of  these  facts  proves  the  utter  groundlessness  of 
Macaulay's  assertions.  It  is  hardly  necessary  to  add 
that  his  criticism,  like  those  which  preceded  it  and 
followed  it,  had  not  the  slightest  influence  in  purifying 
literature,  so  far  as  that  was  to  be  accomplished  by 
destroying  the  continued  sale  of  Montgomery's  works. 
It  did  not  hasten  a  single  moment  the  approach  of 
that  oblivion  which  was  sure  to  overtake  them  event- 
ually. It  was  not  till  the  subject  of  his  criticism  had 
been  for  some  time  in  his  grave  and  even  his  name 
forgotten  that  this  review  by  Macaulay  was  given 
credit  for  a  destruction  which  it  never  had  the  slightest 
effect  in  bringing  about. 

The  names  of  some  of  those  who  believed  seriously 
in  Montgomery  as  a  poet  have  been  given,  not  because 
a  favorable  verdict  on  their  part  necessarily  implies 
desert,  but  because  it  does  show  that  there  was  some- 
where a  real  foundation  for  his  popularity ;  that  it  was 
no  mere  creation  of  the  engineering  of  puffing  set  in 
motion  by  the  author  or  his  publisher.  Still  it  remains 
a  legitimate  subject  of  inquiry  what  was  it  that  led 
to  this  extraordinary  and  prolonged  success.  A 
cursory  examination  of  the  poems  will  show  that  they 


200  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

abound  in  commonplace  thoughts  set  forth  in  pompous 
phraseology ;  that  the  epithets  are  sometimes  meaning- 
less, sometimes  inappropriate ;  that  the  lines  are  inter- 
spersed %vith  unknown  words,  apparently  the  coinage 
of  the  author  himself;  that  there  is  no  central  unity 
in  the  treatment  of  the  theme,  but  that  the  whole  is 
made  up  of  a  series  of  detached  passages  which  could 
have  been  omitted  altogether  or  could  have  been 
extended  indefinitely,  without  in  the  slightest  degree 
interfering  with  the  development  of  the  plot,  whose 
parts  have  not  the  cohesion  of  orderly  growth,  but  the 
adhesion  of  accidental  suggestion,  and  were  as  appro- 
priate to  one  subject  as  to  another.  On  the  other 
hand,  it  is  fair  to  say  that  Montgomery  had  been  a 
diligent  student  of  Dryden,  Pope,  and  Goldsmith,  and 
had  learned  to  reproduce  certain  characteristics  of 
their  style  with  a  good  deal  of  cleverness.  This  trick 
of  expression  caught  no  small  number  of  those  who 
do  not  detect  easily  the  difference  between  an  imitation 
and  an  original.  With  all  his,  verbiage,  too,  there  was 
occasionally  rhetorical  pomp ;  and  while  his  ideas  were 
commonplace,  they  were  sometimes  expressed  in  a 
striking  way.  His  verse  too  was  smooth,  and  as 
Dryden  said  of  Settle's,  it  had  a  blundering  kind  of 
melody.  Furthermore,  what  in  later  life  added  to  his 
popularity  was  the  excellence  of  his  private  life  and 
the  good  which  in  many  ways  he  accomplished.  One 
is  too  often  compelled  to  regret  that  individuals  who 
intellectually  are  worthy  of  contempt  will  persist  in 
being  morally  in  the  highest  degree  praiseworthy. 
Still,  if  we  can  confidently  say  that  this  phenomenal 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  OF  THE  PERIOD    201 

success — not  the  passing  popularity  of  a  day  but 
extending  over  a  lifetime — was  not  due  to  the  agency 
imputed,  to  what  shall  it  be  attributed?  The  question 
is  much  easier  to  ask  than  to  answer.  Who  can  explain 
the  immense  sale  of  works  of  fiction  in  one  generation 
of  which  the  next  generation  knows  nothing  at  all,  or 
if  it  knows  despises?  Yet  in  the  case  of  Montgomery's 
productions  there  is  one  factor  which  will  account  in 
a  measure  for  their  warm  reception  by  a  certain  por- 
tion of  the  public.  This  is  the  same  agency  that  has 
caused  the  temporary  success  in  the  past  of  several 
works  of  a  similar  or  an  allied  nature,  and  will  cause 
the  like  success  of  others  in  the  future.  It  is  the  appeal 
they  make  to  a  particular  class  of  readers.  They  all 
treat  of  moral  or  religious  topics.  The  subjects  upon 
which  Montgomery  wrote  are  important  in  any  view; 
to  a  large  body  of  men  they  will  always  be  of  supreme 
importance.  It  is  hard  for  a  certain  class  of  even 
well-educated  persons,  with  ample  opportunities  for 
observation,  to  comprehend  the  fact;  but  there  are  no 
questions  which  appeal  to  so  vast  a  multitude  as  those 
which  treat  directly  or  remotely  of  the  relations  of 
man  to  his  Maker,  and  of  the  thousand  and  one  matters 
of  inquiry  and  discussion  which  concern  the  moral 
government  of  the  universe.  The  interest  they  take 
in  the  theme  not  only  attracts  their  attention  to  works 
dealing  with  it,  but  blunts  distinctly  the  literary  sense. 
By  nothing  are  even  able  judges  so  easily  imposed 
upon  as  by  religious  poetry,  if  they  themselves  are 
religiously  inclined.  They  are  disposed  to  accord 
exceptional  ability  to  the  writer  who  expresses  in  any 


202  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

new  or  striking  way  opinions  which  they  hold  or  feel- 
ings with  which  they  sympathize.  It  is  in  truth  a 
singular  fact  that  the  moment  any  poem  treats  of  the 
truths  of  religion  in  a  tone  indicative  of  fervent  piety, 
the  critical  power  of  many  intelligent  men  deserts  them 
at  once.  When  they  find  spirituality  of  sentiment 
they  are  easily  led  to  believe  in  the  existence  of  lit- 
erary inspiration.  The  good  fortune  thus  resulting 
has  fallen  to  the  lot  of  several  writers,  and  it  fell  to 
Montgomery  on  a  grand  scale. 

If  feelings  of  this  sort  be  occasionally  true  of  per- 
sons of  superior  intellectual  powers,  how  much  truer 
are  they  of  that  immense  body  of  serious  men  who, 
possessing  limited  literary  taste,  are  insensible  to 
high  literary  art,  but  who  have  ever  before  their  eyes 
lofty  moral  and  religious  standards.  Any  production 
which  tends  to  strengthen  the  hold  of  these  is  to  them 
for  that  very  reason  attractive.  If  in  addition  they 
get  the  impression  that  it  is  literature  in  the  high  sense 
of  the  word,  they  have  the  satisfaction  of  feeling  that 
not  only  is  their  spiritual  nature  elevated  but  their 
intellectual  nature  enriched.  No  composition  of  any 
sort  will  excite  more  general  interest  than  under 
favoring  circumstances  does  sacred  poetry;  for  there 
is  nothing  a  large  share  of  the  English-speaking  race 
enjoy  more  keenly  than  being  preached  to.  This 
feeling  naturally  shows  itself  in  their  attitude  towards 
literature  or  what  they  consider  literature.  For  them 
all  other  pleasures  pale  beside  the  reading  of  plati- 
tudes seasoned  with  morality  and  religion  and  gar- 
nished with  the  ornament  of  verse.     To  them  is  due 


POPULAR  AUTHORS  OF  THE  PERIOD    203 

the  immense  sale  of  works  which  have  little  to  recom- 
mend them  but  the  goodness  or  rather  goodiness  of 
the  sentiments  they  convey.  They  honestly  believe 
that  they  are  appreciating  fine  poetry  when  they  are 
simply  listening  with  devout  attention  to  common- 
place preaching.  To  this  far  from  limited  class 
of  persons  Montgomery's  writings  were  addressed. 
What  jarred  upon  the  feelings  of  men  of  highly  culti- 
vated literary  taste  was  not  to  them  in  the  slightest 
degree  offensive.  On  the  contrary  it  was  often 
attractive.  Still  if  the  critics  could  not  affect  Mont- 
gomery's repute  seriously  with  his  contemporaries 
they  have  had  their  way  with  their  descendants. 
They  have  succeeded  in  maintaining  after  his  death 
the  distinction  which  they  set  up  during  his  life.  In 
the  new  'Dictionary  of  National  Biography'  several 
of  these  writers,  whom  no  one  ever  reads  now  or  has 
even  heard  of,  are  characterized  as  poets,  while  Mont- 
gomery himself  is  put  down  as  a  poetaster. 

The  same  fondness  for  cheap  moral  commonplace 
manifested  itself  in  the  Victorian  period  in  the  success 
which  waited  upon  a  book  which  was  brought  out  a 
little  later — more  precisely  speaking,  towards  the  end 
of  the  fourth  decade.  In  spite  of  its  great  sale 
in  England,  Montgomery's  poetry  had  but  little 
circulation  in  America.  Not  so  with  the  'Proverbial 
Philosophy'  of  Martin  Farquhar  Tupper,  the  first 
series  of  which  appeared  in  1838.  Though  taking 
nominally  the  form  of  verse  it  was  not  essentially 
different  in  its  subject  or  its  fortune  from  a  prose 
treatise   which    came   out   nearly   a   century   before. 


204  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

This  was  Robert  Dodsley's  'The  (Economy  of  Human 
Life,'  which  purported  to  be  a  translation  from  a 
Brahman  manuscript.  The  imputed  origin  distinctly 
added  to  the  favor  it  met;  for  there  has  always  been 
a  general  feeling  among  the  Western  nations  that 
wisdom  resembles  the  sun  in  having  its  rise  in  the 
East.  But  what  contributed  even  more  to  its  imme- 
diate success  was  the  report  which  seems  to  have  been 
carefully  fostered  at  the  outset  that  the  author  of  the 
work  was  Lord  Chesterfield.  At  that  time  his  name 
would  sell  anything.  But  without  these  agencies  it 
would  have  achieved  popularity;  for  it  was  made  up 
of  that  cheap  sort  of  moralizing  which  is  peculiarly 
dear  to  the  Anglo-Saxon  heart.  Though  nothing  more 
utterly  commonplace  was  ever  produced  the  work 
went  through  edition  after  edition  during  the  eight- 
eenth century  and  even  later.  This  success  was  more 
than  repeated  during  the  nineteenth  century  by  the 
'Proverbial  Philosophy'  of  Tupper.  The  circulation 
of  the  work  was  enormous  in  England;  it  was  even 
greater  in  America.  Before  a  half-century  had  gone 
by,  hundreds  of  thousands  of  copies  had  been  disposed 
of  in  the  two  countries.  It  is  a  somewhat  striking 
fact  that  the  three  writers  just  mentioned  met  with 
such  amazing  success  in  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  so  far  as  that  is  indicated  by  the  sale  of  their 
works.  It  is  as  striking  a  fact  that  they  are  now 
scarcely  known  at  all,  or  if  spoken  of  are  usually 
spoken  of  with  derision. 


CHAPTER  VII  .: 

THE  POEMS  OF  1830 

Tennyson's  prize  poem  had  appeared  in  1829.  It 
was  in  the  year  following  that  the  two  brothers,  who 
had  brought  out  their  first  volume  conjointly,  appealed 
separately  to  the  public.  On  the  fourteenth  of  March 
appeared  at  Cambridge  a  volume  of  Charles  Tenny- 
son's, entitled  'Sonnets  and  Fugitive  Pieces.'  About 
three  months  later — towards  the  end  of  June — was 
published  at  London  by  Effingham  Wilson,  Alfred's 
volume  of  'Poems,  Chiefly  Lyrical.'  It  had  been 
the  original  intention  to  have  his  productions  come 
out  in  conjunction  with  those  of  Arthur  Hallam. 
The  poems  of  the  latter  were  set  up  and  a  few  copies 
were  printed  and  distributed  among  his  friends. 
But  Hallam 's  father  preferred — very  wisely  pre- 
ferred— that  his  son's  pieces  should  be  withheld  from 
publication.  Accordingly  Tennyson's  poems  were 
published  by  themselves. 

When  this  volume  came  out,  Tennyson  was  still  a 
minor.  Attention  has  been  called  more  than  once  to 
the  fact  that  he  had  been  early  hailed  by  the  little 
circle  to  which  he  belonged  at  Cambridge  as  the  coming 
man.  Notes  and  diaries  of  the  men  of  that  time  have 
been  preserved  and  printed.  They  are  singularly 
unanimous  in  the  tribute  of  admiration  they  pay  to 


206  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

what  they  conceive  to  be  the  greatness  of  Tennyson 
and  of  his  assured  eminence  in  the  future.  But  it  was 
something  more  than  the  mere  praise  of  a  private 
circle  that  certain  of  his  admirers  sought  for  him  now. 
They  began  at  once  an  active  propaganda  to  spread 
his  fame  far  and  wide.  Naturally  among  these  Arthur 
Hallam  was  foremost.  Early  the  following  year  he 
forwarded  the  volumes  of  the  two  brothers  to  Leigh 
Hunt.  That  author  had  started  in  September,  1830, 
a  daily  journal  called  'The  Tatler.'  It  was  devoted 
almost  exclusively  to  literature  and  the  drama.  In 
his  letter  Hallam  declared  that  Tennyson  was  the 
true  heir  to  the  kingdom  of  Parnassus,  the  throne  of 
which  had  been  vacant  since  the  death  of  Keats.  '*I 
flatter  myself,"  he  wrote  of  the  volume,  ''you  will, 
if  you  peruse  that  book,  be  surprised  and  delighted  to 
find  a  new  prophet  of  those  true  principles  of  Art" — 
it  was  Art  with  a  capital  letter — "which  in  this 
country  you  were  among  the  first  to  recommend  both 
by  precept  and  example."  He  repeated  the  remarks 
which  by  that  time  had  become  habitual  with  all 
dealers  in  doubtful  poetical  wares,  that  neither  of  the 
two  poets,  whose  volumes  he  had  forwarded,  was 
likely  to  become  extensively  or  immediately  popular. 
They  did  not  appeal  to  the  world  at  large,  which  was 
known  to  abound  in  all  evil,  especially  that  of  bad 
taste.  They  addressed  on  the  contrary — here  follow 
Hallam 's  exact  words — "the  elect  Church  of  Urania, 
which  we  know  to  be  small  and  in  tribulation.  Now 
in  this  church,"  he  continued,  "you  have  preferment, 
and  what  you  preach  will  be  considered  by  the  faithful 


THE  POEMS  OF  1830  207 

as  a  sound  form  of  words."  It  was  inevitable  that 
the  request  should  follow  to  which  this  preliminary 
flattery  had  paved  the  way.  *'If  you  agree,"  he  added, 
*'you  will  not  perhaps  object  to  mentioning  them 
favorably  in  the  Tatler."^ 

In  his  letter  to  Hunt,  Hallam  called  also  attention 
to  a  criticism  of  Tennyson's  poems  which  had  ap- 
peared in  'The  Westminster  Review'  for  January, 
1831.  He  attributed  the  authorship  of  it  to  Bowring 
who  was  the  editor  of  the  periodical.  But  he  was  not 
certain  of  it.  There  seems  no  sufficient  reason  to 
believe  the  ascription  to  be  true  and  a  good  deal  to 
think  it  to  be  false.  Certainly  it  is  to  be  hoped  so, 
for  the  editor's  own  sake.  It  is  enough  to  have  to 
endure  the  responsibility  of  having  admitted  the 
article  into  the  'Review'  without  being  compelled  to 
bear  the  additional  burden  of  having  written  it.  Never 
were  more  absurd  general  \dews  on  poetry  combined 
with  more  absurd  special  criticism.  It  justified  all  the 
abuse  Christopher  North  subsequently  heaped  upon 
it,  though  not  the  way  in  which  that  was  expressed. 

The  article  in  the  'Westminster'  was  couched 
throughout  in  language  which  it  would  be  weak  to  call 
laudatory.  Considering  the  fact  that  if  Tennyson's 
reputation  had  to  rest  on  the  volume  of  1830,  he  would 
hardly  be  regarded  as  a  poet  of  the  third-rate  order, 
it  is  difficult  not  to  believe  that  the  criticism  contained 
in  this  review  came  from  the  partiality  of  personal 
friendship  acting  either  directly  or  indirectly.    If  not 

1  Letter  of  January  11,  1831,  in  J.  Nichols's  'Literary  Anecdotes  of 
the  Nineteenth  Century,'  Vol.  I,  p.  25. 


208  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

due  to  that,  there  was  displayed  a  power  of  fore- 
seeing the  future  not  often  granted  to  the  acutest  of 
critics.  For  there  was  no  moderation  in  the  expres- 
sion of  the  praise.  A  great  poet  had  arisen,  at  least 
a  person  possessed  of  great  poetical  power;  and  to 
the  proper  direction  of  that  power  the  reviewer  pro- 
fessed to  look  with  anxiety.  All  this  might  be  for- 
given to  the  enthusiasm  of  personal  affection.  What 
is  unpardonable  is  the  hopeless  imbecility  of  the  views 
set  forth.  ^'The  great  principle  of  human  improve- 
ment," it  declared,  "is  at  work  in  poetry  as  well  as 
everywhere  else."  Such  was  the  thesis  maintained 
and  illustrated.  Criminal  jurisprudence,  we  were  told, 
was  in  the  way  of  being  reformed ;  light  was  about  to 
be  shed  over  legislation;  religion  was  becoming  puri- 
fied; arts  and  sciences  were  made  more  available  for 
human  comfort.  All  this  was  due  to  the  ever  growing 
acquaintance  that  was  going  on  with  the  philosophy 
of  mind  and  of  man,  and  to  the  increasing  facility  with 
which  that  philosophy  was  applied.  Of  course,  it 
would  be  a  pity  if  poetry  were  an  exception  to  this 
great  law  of  progression  in  human  affairs.  It  was  no 
exception.  This  law  of  progression  it  is,  said  the 
prophetic  reviewer,  that  will  secure  also  a  succession 
of  creations  out  of  the  unbounded  and  everlasting 
material  of  poetry.  ''The  machinery  of  a  poem,"  he 
went  on  to  assert,  ''is  not  less  susceptible  of  improve- 
ment than  the  machinery  of  a  cotton-mill ;  nor  is  there 
any  better  reason  why  the  one  should  retrograde  from 
the  daj'S  of  Milton,  than  the  other  from  those  of 
Arkwright. ' ' 


THE  POEMS  OF  1830  209 

This  is  certainly  a  comfortable  doctrine.  It  occa- 
sionally crops  out  in  the  history  of  criticism.  Unfor- 
tunately it  is  never  exemplified  in  the  works  with  which 
criticism  concerns  itself.  Of  machine  poetry  the  re- 
marks of  the  reviewer  may  be  true ;  but  hardly  of  the 
poetry  of  genius.  With  that  the  law  of  progression 
does  not  operate.  Homer  died  fully  three  thousand 
years  ago;  that  is,  if  he  ever  lived  at  all.  Virgil 
flourished  about  two  thousand  years  ago.  Yet  the 
world  has  not  yet  seen  any  marked  improvement  upon 
the  method  these  two  poets  followed  and  the  results 
they  obtained.  Shakespeare  was  writing  dramas  more 
than  three  hundred  years  ago.  So  far,  not  alone  in 
England,  but  in  all  the  countries  of  Europe,  no  plays 
have  been  brought  to  the  attention  of  mankind  which 
indicate  a  marked  advance  upon  what  he  accomplished. 
That  there  will  be  variations  in  the  form  and  fashion 
and  creeds  of  poetry  at  different  periods  may  be  very 
likely;  for  the  tastes  and  standards  of  one  generation 
are  not  necessarily  the  tastes  and  standards  of  another. 
In  consequence,  men  often  think  they  have  improved 
when  they  have  merely  changed.  But  genius  has  no 
past.  It  recognizes  no  law  of  progression.  Certain 
conditions  there  may  be  essential  to  its  birth  and 
development.  But  these  once  given,  it  is  independent 
of  time  and  place  and  circumstance.  It  starts  into  life 
perfectly  formed. 

This,  however,  was  not  the  opinion  of  the  'West- 
minster '  reviewer.  He  not  only  praised  the  philosophi- 
cal character  of  the  poems  of  Tennyson,  he  was  confi- 
dent that  they  would  be  the  precursors  of  a  series  of 


210  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

productions    which    would   beautifully   illustrate    his 
speculations  and  convincingly  prove  their  soundness. 
In  order  to   sustain  this  forecast  of  the  future  he 
heaped  eulogy  after  eulogy  upon  individual  pieces. 
The  author,  he  said,  had  the  secret  of  the  transmigra- 
tion of  the  soul.     He  could  cast  his  own  spirit  into 
anything,  real  or  imaginary.     Scarcely  Vishnu  him- 
self became  incarnate  more  easily,  frequently,  or  per- 
fectly.    Two  of  the  poems — 'Nothing  will  Die'  and 
*A11  Things  will  Die' — the  reviewer  contrasted  with 
*L 'Allegro'  and  'II  Penseroso.'     He  pronounced  no 
opinion  upon  the  comparative  merits  of  the  execution 
of  these  four,  but  he  assured  us  that  there  is  not  less 
truth  and  perhaps  a  more  refined  observation  in  the 
point   of   view   from   which   the    subjects    had   been 
approached  by  the  modern  poet.    As  Tennyson  him- 
self in  the  edition  of  1842  suppressed  these  two  partic- 
ular pieces,  it  is  evident  that  he  himself  was  not  so 
struck  by  their  superiority  to  Milton's  as  had  been  his 
reviewer.    The  amatory  poems,  the  critic  further  re- 
marked, are  expressions  ''not  of  heartless  sensuality, 
nor  of  a  sickly  refinement,  nor  of  fantastic  devotion, 
but  of  manly  love."    They  illustrate,  too,  he  told  us, 
the  philosophy  of  the  passion,  while  they  exhibit  the 
various  phases  of  its  existence  and  embody  its  power. 
In  his  observations  on  the  pictures  of  women  as  shown 
in  the  characterizations   of   Claribel,   Lilian,   Isabel, 
Madeline,  and  Adeline,  he  set  no  bounds  to  the  dis- 
play of  his  ecstatic  admiration.    "His  portraits,"  he 
wrote,  "are  delicate,  his  likenesses   (we  will  answer 
for  them)  perfect,  and  they  have  life,  character,  and 


THE  POEMS  OF  1830  211 

indhiduality. "  The  phrase  in  parentheses  seems  to 
imply  that  these  were  real  beings  who  were  described, 
and  that  the  persons  meant  were  known  to  the  re- 
viewer. Though  this  is  a  natural  interpretation,  no 
confidence  can  be  felt  in  any  conclusions  drawn  from 
the  language  of  an  almost  crazy  panegyrist,  and 
Tennyson  himself  denied  any  individual  reference. 
In  fact,  no  fault  was  found  with  anything  contained  in 
the  volume,  save  a  faint  objection  to  the  occasional 
irregularities  of  the  measure  and  the  use  of  antiquated 
words  and  obsolete  expressions. 

Leigh  Hunt  in  his  turn  responded  at  once  to  the 
suggestions  which  had  been  thrown  out  by  Hallam. 
Four  articles  he  wrote  upon  the  poems  of  the  brothers. 
Two  of  them  appeared  in  the  numbers  of  ^The  Tatler' 
for  February  24  and  26,  1831,  and  two  in  the  numbers 
for  March  1  and  3.  The  former  were  devoted  mainly 
to  Alfred  Tennyson,  the  latter  to  Charles.  He  hailed 
them  both  as  great  coming  poets.  However  well  the 
prophecy  has  been  fulfilled  in  the  case  of  the  one,  it 
can  hardly  be  called  a  successful  prediction  in  the  case 
of  the  other.  '*We  have  great  pleasure,"  he  wrote, 
''in  stating  that  we  have  seen  no  such  poetical  writing 
since  the  last  volume  of  Mr.  Keats;  and  that  the 
authors,  who  are  both  young  men,  we  believe  at  college, 
may  take  their  stand  at  once  among  the  first  poets 
of  the  day."  It  is  an  interesting  commentary  upon 
the  character  of  these  productions  that  this  expe- 
rienced critic  found  it  difficult  to  decide  as  to  the  com- 
parative merits  of  the  two  brothers.  He  asserted  that 
he  could  not  make  up  his  mind  which  of  them  was  the 


212  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

better.  It  is  evident,  however,  that  his  preference 
finally  went  to  Alfred,  and  that  the  feeling  of  his  supe- 
riority grew  upon  him  as  he  continued  the  examina- 
tion of  the  respective  volumes.  It  ought,  however,  to 
be  added  in  all  fairness  that  he  had  been  assisted  in 
reaching  this  point  of  view  by  Hallam.  In  his  letter 
Hallam  had  said  that  while  the  work  of  Charles 
Tennyson  showed  a  mind  capable  of  noble  sentiments, 
it  was  inferior  in  depth  and  range  of  thought  to  his 
brother's.    This  it  very  certainly  was. 

But  unlike  the  'Westminster'  reviewer,  Leigh 
Hunt's  criticism  was  no  unmixed  laudation.  He  sin- 
gled out  pieces  for  blame  as  well  as  for  praise.  To 
one  who  is  still  innocent  enough  to  put  faith  in  the 
criticism  of  assumed  or  presumed  literary  experts,  it 
will  come  as  something  of  a  shock  to  discover  that  the 
poem  entitled  'Recollections  of  the  Arabian  Nights,' 
a  few  months  later  to  be  highly  celebrated  by  Christo- 
pher North,  met  with  little  favor  at  Hunt's  hands.  He 
agreed,  however,  with  the  Scotch  critic  in  having  little 
patience  mth  what  may  be  called  the  patriotic  poems. 
The  'National  Song,'  in  particular,  he  condemned 
unsparingly.  "We  hold  the  National  Song  to  be 
naught,"  he  wrote.  This  was  letting  it  off  easily. 
There  was  certainly  ample  justification  for  the  view 
he  took  of  this  little  song,  which,  after  suppression  in 
later  editions,  Tennyson  revived  in  1892  in  the  play  of 
'The  Foresters.'  There  it  fits  more  appropriately  the 
mouth  of  the  performers.  In  them  the  braggart  char- 
acter pervading  it  is  not  so  offensive  under  the  circum- 
stances as  it  is  in  the  song  taken  by  itself.    Patriotism 


THE  POEMS  OF  1830  213 

is  a  good  thing  in  its  place;  but  no  excess  of  it  can 
enrich  poetry  which  is  itself  nothing  but  commonplace : 
while  the  patriotism  in  turn  is  rendered  cheap  by  the 
inadequacy  of  the  words  to  express  the  feelings  which 
are  entertained.  The  excited  passions  of  the  moment 
occasionally  impart  to  pieces  of  this  character  a  sort  of 
vitality,  which  subsequent  perusal  in  a  different  state 
of  mind  shows  to  be  wholly  unjustifiable.  Later  in  his 
career  Tennyson's  intense  national  feeling  lifted  him 
at  times  into  an  atmosphere  of  high  poetical  achieve- 
ment. 'The  Charge  of  the  Light  Brigade'  's\ill  live  far 
longer  in  his  verse  than  on  the  pages  of  any  historian. 
But  too  generally  and  in  his  early  writings  particu- 
larly, his  patriotic  utterances  reach  a  height  little 
above  the  vaporings  of  the  commonplace  man  and 
manifest  a  spirit  hardly  creditable  to  the  prejudices  of 
the  narrow  man. 

Leigh  Hunt,  in  awarding  the  superiority  on  the 
whole  to  Alfred,  gave  expression  to  the  opinion  gen- 
erally entertained  by  the  best  judges.  That,  too, 
accorded  like^sise  with  the  estimate  widely  held  in  the 
circle  of  personal  friends  who  surrounded  the  two 
brothers.  Still,  among  them  no  confident  tone  was 
assumed  in  this  matter.  A  dissenting  opinion  came, 
too,  from  quarters  presumably  carrying  great  weight. 
There  was  no  recognition  of  Alfred's  pre-eminence  on 
the  part  of  the  two  chief  li\ing  poets.  They  awarded 
the  palm  to  the  elder.  Wordsworth  was  at  Cambridge 
in  November,  1830.  In  a  letter  he  wrote  from  there  he 
bore  witness  to  the  local  reputation  of  both  the  authors 
who  had  come  out  that  year  in  print.    ""We  have,"  he 


214  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

said,  ''also  a  respectable  show  of  blossom  in  poetry — 
two  brothers  of  the  name  of  Tennyson,  one  in  particu- 
lar not  a  little  promising. '  '^  There  is  nothing  in  these 
words  to  indicate  which  of  the  brothers  the  veteran 
writer  had  in  mind.  From  subsequent  revelations, 
however,  it  is  clear  that  it  was  Charles.  In  March, 
1848,  Emerson  called  upon  Wordsworth  at  Rydal 
Mount.  In  the  course  of  the  conversation  the  latter 
told  him  that  ''he  had  thought  an  elder  brother  of 
Tennyson  at  first  the  better  poet,  but  must  now  reckon 
Alfred  the  true  one."^ 

The  same  belief  in  the  superiority  of  Charles  to 
Alfred  seems  to  have  been  taken  by  Coleridge.  Written 
record  of  his  opinions  of  the  work  of  the  former  has 
been  left  behind  in  comments  on  the  sonnets  contained 
in  a  copy  of  the  volume  of  the  elder  brother,  which  is 
preserved  in  the  British  Museum.  He  expressed  much 
admiration  for  these  sonnets  generally  and  special 
admiration  for  several  of  them,  mingled  with  specific 
criticism  of  words  and  lines.  That  entitled  'To  a 
Lark'  he  declared  to  be  one  of  the  best  in  the  language. 
He  spoke  of  another,  and  indeed  of  a  large  propor- 
tion of  them  as  standing  "between  Wordsworth  and 
Southey  and  partaking  of  the  excellencies  of  both." 
There  was  nothing  in  the  work  to  justify  this  over- 
strained laudation,  though  it  would  not  have  been  hard 
to  rival  Southey 's  efforts  in  this  kind.  Coleridge's 
commendation  of  them  is  just  as  valuable  as  his  glori- 
fication of  the  poems   of  William  Lisle  Bowles,  by 

iW.  Knight's  'Wordsworth,'  Vol.  Ill,  p.  188. 
2 'English  Traits,'  Chap.  XVII. 


THE  POEMS  OF  1830  215 

whose  sonnets  in  particular  he  tells  us  that  he  was  for 
years  "enthusiastically  delighted  and  inspired."  His 
further  indi\idual  censures  of  words  and  phrases  have 
now  lost  their  point,  if  indeed  they  had  any  in  the  first 
instance.  Still,  praise  from  such  a  presumed  authori- 
tative source  was  valued  highly.  John  Kemble  wrote 
to  his  sister  that  Coleridge  had  expressed  the  highest 
admiration  for  the  sonnets  of  Charles  Tennyson.^ 
"The  old  man  of  Highgate  has  rejoiced  over  him," 
wrote  Hallam  also  to  Emily  Tennyson.^  Unfortunately 
very  few  others  rejoiced.  His  volume  of  sonnets  seems 
to  have  fallen  dead  from  the  press.  The  only  notice 
it  received,  so  far  as  I  can  discover,  is  that  of  Leigh 
Hunt's  which  has  already  been  given.  One's  faith  in 
critical  dicta  suffers  indeed  a  rude  shock  to  find  two 
of  the  greatest  poets  of  the  time  expressing  a  prefer- 
ence for  mild  commonplace  with  occasional  gleams  of 
felicity  over  genuine  originality,  crude  and  undevel- 
oped as  it  then  was. 

It  is  undoubtedly  easy  enough  to  be  wise  after  the 
event.  Yet,  however  differently  it  may  have  appeared 
then  to  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge,  the  modern  reader 
has  no  more  difficulty  in  recognizing  the  superiority 
of  Alfred  to  Charles  in  their  respective  volumes  of 
1830  than  he  has  in  recognizing  the  same  superiority 
in  their  respective  contributions  to  the  collection, 
entitled  'Poems  by  Two  Brothers.'  Such  was  mani- 
festly the  sentiment  pervading  at  the  time  the  circle 
surrounding  the   two   Tennysons   at   Cambridge.     It 

1 'Biographia  Literaria, '  Chap.  I. 
2 'Memoir,'  Vol.  I,  p.  75. 


216  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

represented  the  attitude  of  the  general  public.  The 
sonnets  of  Charles  encountered  indeed  both  then  and 
at  later  periods  what  was  far  worse  than  hostile  criti- 
cism. They  were  not  spoken  of  at  all.  It  is  pretty  cer- 
tain indeed  that  the  recej)tion  his  first  volume  met 
from  the  public  did  not  tempt  him  to  try  his  fortunes 
speedily  again.  The  life  he  led  was  henceforward  a 
somewhat  uneventful  one;  in  some  respects  it  must 
have  been  a  disappointing  one.  He  entered  the  min- 
istry, and  in  1835  became  curate  of  Tealby,  in  his 
native  county.  His  choice  of  profession  excited  the 
regret  of  Leigh  Hunt.  ''I  was  fearful  of  what  he 
would  come  to,"  he  wrote  to  a  friend,  ''by  certain  mis- 
givings in  his  poetry  and  a  want  of  the  active  poetic 
faith. '  '^  It  was  probably  not  so  much  a  want  of  active 
poetic  faith — whatever  Hunt  meant  by  that  expres- 
sion— that  decided  his  career,  as  his  growing  con- 
sciousness of  his  want  of  poetic  ability.  After  two 
years  of  his  Tealby  curacy  he  became  vicar  of  Grasby, 
a  lonely  village  about  three  miles  northwest  of  Caistor. 
His  uncle,  Samuel  Turner,  was  a  resident  of  this  last- 
named  place.  By  the  will  of  this  kinsman,  he  became 
heir  to  an  income  of  five  hundred  pounds  a  year,  on 
condition  that  he  should  change  his  name  from  Charles 
Tennyson  to  Charles  Turner.  This  he  did.  On  May 
24, 1836,^  he  was  married  at  Horncastle  to  Louisa  Sell- 
wood,  the  youngest  sister  of  the  future  wife  of  his 
younger  brother.  According  to  one  report,  a  separa- 
tion speedily  followed;  but  in  1849  the  couple  came 

1 '  Memoir, '  Vol.  I,  p.  164. 
2  Ibid.,  p.  148. 


THE  POEMS  OF  1830  217 

together  again,  after  having  lived  apart  for  over  a 
dozen  years. ^ 

More  than  a  third  of  a  century  passed  before  Charles 
Tennyson  published  another  volume  of  verse.  It  could 
not  have  been  the  overshadowing  success  of  his 
younger  brother  which  led  him  to  maintain  silence. 
As  we  shall  see,  that  success  was  deferred  for  a  long 
time.  It  is  much  more  likely  that  it  was  the  loftiness 
of  position  which  his  brother  had  won  that  later  led 
him  to  come  again  before  the  public.  In  1864  aj^peared 
a  volume  of  nearly  one  hundred  sonnets  ^\ith  a  dedi- 
cation to  Alfred  Tennyson  prefixed.  Additional  vol- 
umes followed  in  1868  and  in  1873.  After  his  death  in 
1879  his  poetical  works  were  collected  and  brought  out 
in  1880  in  a  single  volume.  They  were  accompanied  by 
an  introductory  essay  of  James  Spedding,  which  had 
appeared  in  a  periodical  the  previous  September.^  It 
was  a  most  fervent  eulogy  both  of  the  man  and  of  the 
poet,  though  it  is  manifest  that  the  polemic  sonnets  did 
not  appeal  to  this  most  kindly  of  critics  either  for  the 
spirit  characterizing  them  or  for  their  argumentative 
force.  Of  the  others,  however,  he  thought  highly. 
Spedding  indeed  predicted  that  many  of  these  "in- 
spired strains,"  would  probably  '^take  place  here- 
after .  .  .  among  the  memorable  utterances  of  our 
time."  He  further  spoke  of  the  author  as  one  among 
the  candidates  for  immortality  who  '4s  entitled  to  a 
high  place."  The  lifetime  of  a  generation  has  gone 
by  since  these  forecasts  of  the  future  were  made.    So 


I'The  Journal  of  Walter  White,'  1898,  p.  142. 
2  ' Nineteenth  Century,'  September,  1879. 


218  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

far  the  verdict  of  posterity  has  failed  to  confirm  the 
opinion  of  the  reviewer.  There  is  every  indication 
that  whatever  repute  Charles  Tennyson  may  come  to 
have  in  the  future  will  be  due  to  his  brother  and  not 
to  himself. 

As  regards  his  career  as  an  author,  it  was  the  for- 
tune or  misfortune  of  Charles  to  give  himself  up  almost 
entirely  to  the  production  of  sonnets;  and  he  who 
chooses  to  cultivate  that  field  of  poetical  composition 
may  well  make  up  his  mind  in  advance  to  leave  all  hope 
behind.  After  nearly  a  hundred  years  of  intermis- 
sion this  form  of  verse  came  once  more  into  vogue  in 
the  early  part  of  the  second  half  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  Resort  to  the  use  of  it  steadily  increased 
after  it  had  once  been  introduced  or  rather  reintro- 
duced. From  the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century 
up  to  the  present  time  addiction  to  it  has  raged  with 
extreme  violence;  never  probably  more  so  than  now. 
Perhaps  no  other  form  of  verse  has  been  for  a  long 
time  so  generally  employed.  Many  certainly  have 
been  and  still  are  laborers  in  the  field;  scanty  is  the 
harvest  of  value  which  has  been  produced.  The  reason 
is  plain  enough.  The  sonnet  is  the  Procrustean  bed  of 
poetry.  It  is  a  purely  artificial  form  of  verse.  It  has 
a  precise  number  of  lines,  it  has  a  precise  number  of 
feet  to  the  line.  The  expression  of  the  thought  may 
demand  more  space.  That  cannot  be  granted ;  it  must 
be  cut  off.  More  often  the  thought  could  be  better 
expressed  in  fewer  words.  That,  too,  cannot  be 
allowed.  It  must  be  stretched  out  to  fill  up  the  speci- 
fied number  of  lines.    Add  to  this,  that  nearly  all  mod- 


THE  POEMS  OF  1830  219 

ern  producers  of  sonnets  conform  to  the  further 
requirements  of  a  limited  number  of  rhymes  and  of 
their  precise  arrangement.  In  a  language  so  deficient 
as  is  the  English  in  words  having  correspondence  of 
sound,  this  fact  lends  additional  difficulty  to  the  task 
of  their  composition.  ''What  do  they  seem  fit  for," 
wrote  FitzGerald  to  Frederick  Tennyson,  ''but  to  serve 
as  little  shapes  in  which  a  man  may  mould  very 
mechanically  any  single  thought  which  comes  into  his 
head,  which  thought  is  not  lyrical  enough  in  itself  to 
exhale  in  a  more  lyrical  measure?  The  difficulty  of 
the  sonnet  meter  in  English  is  a  good  excuse  for  the 
dull  didactic  thoughts  which  naturally  incline  towards 
it ;  fellows  know  there  is  no  danger  of  decanting  their 
muddy  stuff  ever  so  slowly ;  they  are  neither  prose  nor 
poetry.'" 

It  is  no  wonder  in  consequence  that  the  results,  even 
with  those  who  are  regarded  as  having  succeeded,  bear 
but  a  small  proportion  to  the  labor  put  forth.  In  mod- 
ern times,  Wordsworth,  of  the  great  poets,  has  been 
the  most  successful  cultivator  of  the  sonnet.  With  his 
tendency  to  diffuseness  its  enforced  compression 
proved  often  a  distinct  advantage.  Yet  it  is  perfectly 
safe  to  say  that  his  fame  in  this  particular  rests  upon 
fewer  than  half  a  hundred  of  these  productions.  All 
the  rest  could  be  dropped  from  his  works  without  his 
reputation  suffering  a  tithe  of  loss,  though  he  wrote 
in  all  nearly  four  hundred  pieces  of  this  character. 
Him  as  regards  number  Charles  Tennyson  rivalled. 
His  sonnets  as  found  in  the  final  volume  just  men- 

1  E.  FitzGerald 's  *  Letters  and  Literary  Remains, '  Vol.  I,  p.  73. 


220  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

tioned  lack  one  of  reaching  three  hundred  and  fifty. 
Many  of  them  are  marked  by  a  certain  plaintiveness 
and  tenderness  of  expression;  some  of  them  contain 
fine  lines,  a  few  of  them  fine  passages ;  but  there  is  not 
one  of  them  which,  as  a  whole,  possesses  distinction; 
and  a  sonnet  without  distinction  has  no  ground  for 
existing  at  all.  As  regards  their  content,  too,  no  small 
number  of  the  later  sonnets  were  deformed  by  a  po- 
lemic spirit  which  is  characteristic  of  critical  activity 
rather  than  of  creative.  Agnostics  and  believers  in 
the  higher  criticism  generally  met  with  little  mercy  at 
the  hands  of  this  clerical  dweller  of  the  Lincolnshire 
wolds.  Subjects  of  such  a  nature  it  requires  genius  of 
the  highest  order  to  lift  out  of  the  region  of  contro- 
versy into  that  of  poetry;  and  genius  of  even  a  high 
sort  Charles  Tennyson  did  not  possess.  All  of  the 
sonnets  taken  together  are  hardly  equal  in  value  to 
'At  Midnight,'  the  prefatory  poem  to  the  volume  con- 
taining them,  which  his  brother  wrote  on  June  30, 
1879. 

Not  such,  however,  was  the  belief  of  Alfred  Tenny- 
son. He  ranked  a  few  of  his  brother's  sonnets  as 
being  among  the  noblest  in  the  language.  He  declared 
them  to  be  * 'wonderful."  ''I  sometimes  think,"  he 
said  on  one  occasion,  "that,  of  their  kind,  there  is 
nothing  equal  to  them  in  English  poetry."^  Nor  was 
he  altogether  singular  in  this  view.  Henry  Taylor 
thought  that  Burns  had  not  written  anything  worthy 
to  live  twenty  years;  that  ninety -nine  per  cent  of  his 
production  was  worthless,  and  that  nothing  of  it  was 

1  H.  D,  Eawnsley's  'Memories  of  the  Tennysons,'  p.  101. 


THE  POEMS  OF  1830  221 

of  such  excellence  as  to  found  a  poet's  fame/  But  he 
made  up  for  his  lack  of  appreciation  of  the  Scotch 
writer  by  his  enthusiasm  for  the  sonnets  of  Charles 
Tennyson.  * '  There  are  none  in  the  language, ' '  he  said, 
''more  beautiful  in  their  sincerity  and  truth. "^  The 
general  opinion  as  reflected  by  their  popularity  and 
sale  accords  rather  with  the  opinion  expressed  by 
the  Brownings  who  considered  Frederick  Tennyson, 
though  not  a  great  poet,  to  be  a  distinctly  better  one 
than  Charles.  This  conforms  little,  as  we  have  seen, 
with  Alfred's  estimate.  He  put  these  sonnets  below 
those  only  of  Milton,  Shakespeare,  and  Wordsworth. 
"I  at  least,"  he  said  to  a  visitor,  "rank  my  brother's 
next  to  those  by  the  three  Olympians.'"  The  rest  of 
the  world  may  respect  the  feeling  which  dictated  this 
verdict  of  fraternal  affection.  Individuals  may  be 
found  to  concur  with  it ;  but  it  is  fairly  safe  to  say  that 
it  will  never  become  a  widely  accepted  view. 

Hallam's  efforts  in  behalf  of  the  younger  brother 
did  not  cease  with  his  letter  to  Hunt.  In  April,  1830, 
a  new  monthly  had  been  started  by  a  London  firm 
under  the  title  of  'The  Englishman's  Magazine.' 
After  the  fourth  number  it  passed  into  the  hands  of 
Moxon,  the  future  publisher  of  so  many  poets.  He 
put  forth  strenuous  exertions  for  its  success.  He 
called  to  its  aid  all  the  authors  he  could  command  who 
had  already  acquired  reputation  or  gave  promise  of 
acquiring  it.     The  very  first  number  which  bore  his 

1 ' Correspondence  of  Henry  Taylor,'  1888,  p.  188, 

2  Ibi(J.,  p.  287. 

3W,  A.  Knight's  'Retrospects,'  1904,  p.  49. 


222  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

imprint — that  for  August — numbered  among  its  con- 
tributors, Charles  Lamb,  Motherwell,  Hood,  Miss  Mit- 
ford,  Leigh  Hunt,  Gerald  Griffin,  and  several  other 
writers  more  or  less  prominent  at  the  time.  But 
though  generally  well  spoken  of,  the  undertaking 
did  not  succeed.  An  ominous  advertisement,  which 
appeared  early  in  October,  to  the  effect  that  two  share- 
holders were  wanted  for  the  periodical,  indicated  that 
its  fortunes  were  not  on  a  secure  basis.  The  two 
shareholders  sought  for  apparently  refrained  from 
putting  in  an  appearance.  Accordingly  after  the  issue 
for  October  the  publisher  decided  to  discontinue  the 
magazine. 

To  this  first  of  the  three  numbers  which  appeared 
under  Moxon's  management — that  of  August — Hallam 
contributed  an  article.  It  was  entitled  'On  Some  of 
the  Characteristics  of  Modern  Poetry  and  on  the  Lyri- 
cal Poems  of  Alfred  Tennyson. '  At  the  time  he  com- 
plained to  a  friend  that  it  was  ''so  execrably  printed 
that  every  line  contains  an  error,  and  these  not  always 
palpable."^  Unfortunately  the  error  of  the  criticism 
was  distinctly  palpable.  A  portion  of  this  article  was 
reprinted  by  his  father  in  the  memorial  volume  which 
contained  some  of  his  son's  writings.  In  that,  how- 
ever, the  part  of  it  which  dealt  specifically  with  the 
various  pieces  of  the  new  poet  was  omitted — omitted, 
too,  very  wisely.  There  was  little  restraint  upon  the 
praise  heaped  upon  him,  and  the  censure — which  every 
critic  feels  compelled  to  bestow — was  limited  to  a  few 
slight  cavils  on  the  use  of  particular  words.    He  spoke 

1  'Autobiography  and  Letters  of  Dean  Merivale,'  Oxford,  1898,  p.  160. 


I 


THE  POEMS  OF  1830  223 

of  Tennyson  as  being  of  the  school  of  Shelley  and 
Keats.  Both  these  he  highly  praised.  He  quoted  in 
full  the '  Recollections  of  the  Arabian  Nights, ' '  Oriana, ' 
and  'Adeline.'  The  first  of  these  was  on  the  whole  his 
favorite  of  all  the  poems.  Some  idea  of  the  feeling 
about  it  he  entertained  as  well  as  of  the  extravagance 
of  his  criticism  may  be  inferred  from  his  assertion  that 
its  sixth  verse  was  as  majestic  as  Milton  and  its  twelfth 
as  sublime  as  >(i]schylus.  It  was  remarks  like  these 
which  aroused  the  amusement  and  wrath  of  Chris- 
topher North.  Leigh  Hunt  protested,  too,  at  the  time 
against  the  peculiar  absurdity  of  representing  him  as 
the  originator  of  a  school  to  which  belonged  Shelley 
and  Keats.  He  said  very  justly  that  there  was  nothing 
in  conmion  between  those  authors  and  himself  but  per- 
sonal regard,  a  common  zeal  for  mankind,  and  a  com- 
mon love  of  the  old  poets.  He  further  exhibited  the 
difference  in  the  point  of  view  by  observing  that 
Hallam's  observations  on  Tennyson's  writings  were 
more  to  the  purpose  than  the  specimens  he  gave  of 
them.  In  Hunt's  opinion  he  had  selected  some  of  the 
least  perfect  and  effective  of  the  poems,  apparently 
for  the  reason  that  they  had  been  omitted  by  others. 

Facts  such  as  these  show  how  zealously  the  poet's 
friends  were  working  in  his  behalf.  There  are  indica- 
tions of  this  action  on  their  part  on  every  side.  Milnes, 
while  in  Italy,  received  in  February,  1831,  a  letter  from 
his  college  friend,  Monteith,  one  of  the  Apostles. 
''Have  you  seen,"  wrote  the  latter, — "by-the-bye  you 
cannot — the  review  of  Tennyson's  poems  in  the  West- 
minster?   It  is  really  enthusiastic  about  him,  and  is 


224  '   LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

very  well  written  on  the  whole.  If  we  can  get  him  well 
reviewed  in  the  Edinburgh,  it  will  do."  It  hardly 
needs  to  be  said  that  they  did  not  get  him  well  or  ill 
reviewed  in  the  *  Edinburgh.'  That  lofty  periodical 
was  not  flying  at  any  such  supposedly  small  game. 
Still,  it  would  be  unjust  to  suggest  that  the  favorable 
notices  which  Tennyson  received  were  in  all  cases  due 
directly  or  indirectly  to  personal  friendship.  There 
was  much  in  the  poetry  of  his  volume  which  appealed 
to  those  who  were  in  sympathy  with  the  genius  of 
Shelley  and  of  Keats.  Accordingly  no  external  agen- 
cies were  needed  for  such  men  to  give  expression  to 
their  admiration. 

Two  instances  may  be  given  in  illustration.  A  re- 
view of  the  volume  of  1830  appeared  in  the  March 
number  of  'The  New  Monthly  Magazine'  for  1831. 
The  estimate  expressed  of  Tennyson's  volume  was 
highly  favorable.  That  fact  was  not  due  to  any  pre- 
vious understanding  or  any  outside  influence.  On  the 
contrary,  the  critic  confessed  that  when  encountering 
at  the  outset  some  corrections  in  the  list  of  errata,  he 
was  prepared  for  merriment.  It  needed  the  reading, 
however,  of  but  a  few  of  the  pieces  to  dissipate  any 
expectations  of  that  nature.  He  recognized  at  once 
the  coming  of  a  true  poet.  So  far  as  I  have  observed, 
this  was  the  only  review  of  the  time  which  pointed  out 
distinctly  the  direct  influence  of  Keats  upon  the  new 
aspirant  for  poetic  honors — for  in  Hallam's  article 
this  was  stated  only  in  general  terms.  But  in  Tenny- 
son this  critic  found  all  the  characteristics  which  had 
given  its  distinguishing  mark  to  the  work  of  his  prede- 


THE  POEMS  OF  1830  225 

cessor.  "It  is  full,"  he  wrote,  "of  precisely  the  kind 
of  poetry  for  which  Mr.  Keats  was  assailed,  and  for 
which  the  world  is  already  beginning  to  admire  him. 
We  do  not  mean  that  it  contains  anything  equal,  either 
in  majesty  or  melody,  to  the  'Hyperion,'  the  'Ode  to 
the  Nightingale,'  or  the  'Eve  of  St.  Agnes.'  But  it 
does  contain  many  indications  of  a  similar  genius."^ 

The  re^dew  in  truth  gave  enthusiastic  praise  to  much 
of  the  contents  of  the  volume.  While  the  existence  of 
imperfections  was  conceded,  the  prediction  was  made 
confidently  that  here  was  a  light  which  was  destined 
to  shine  before  men.  Indeed  unless  we  are  to  credit 
the  re\dewer  udth  the  possession  of  prophetic  fore- 
sight, the  laudation  ^yiU.  seem  too  extreme.  Yet  there 
is  no  question  that  it  was  not  only  sincere,  but  was 
altogether  unaffected  by  personal  considerations.  Nor 
was  this  the  only  one  of  the  favorable  notices  which 
came  from  the  outside.  'The  Spectator,'  which  a  short 
time  before  had  started  on  its  long  and  creditable 
career,  contained  also  what  was  on  the  whole  a  highly 
complimentary  review.  In  it  the  critic  confessed  to 
ha^dng  experienced  an  agreeable  surprise  in  finding 
the  work  as  good  as  it  was.  He  had  evidently  been 
prejudiced  against  the  volume  by  the  knowledge  that 
had  come  to  his  ears  that  its  author  had  written  a 
prize  poem.  WTiat  faults  he  found  vdth  him  in  his 
criticism  were  due  to  the  fact  that  he  expected  to  meet 
with  him  again.^  Sentiments  of  the  same  general 
nature,  though  much  more  briefly  expressed,  may  be 

I'New  Monthly  Magazine,'  Vol.  XXXIII,  p.  111. 
2  No.  for  May  8,  1830. 


226  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

also  found  in  an  early  notice  in  'The  Atlas. '^  That 
periodical,  indeed,  claimed  later  to  have  been  the  first 
to  recognize  Tennyson's  genius.  It  is  evident  that  in 
these  criticisms  considerations  due  to  friendship  had 
no  weight  whatever. 

1  No.  for  June  27,  1830. 


CHAPTEE  VIII 
CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  REVIEW 

We  have  seen  that  the  criticism  of  Tennyson's  first 
volume  had  been  generally  favorable.  Not  unnat- 
urally in  the  majority  of  the  reviews  of  the  period  it 
was  not  spoken  of  at  all.  But  nowhere  was  active 
hostility  displayed.  If  there  was  dissent  in  any  quar- 
ter from  the  enthusiastic  praise  which  had  been  lav- 
ished upon  it  by  some,  it  was  not  manifested  publicly ; 
at  least  it  was  not  in  the  organs  which  had  the  great- 
est influence  with  readers.  A  good  deal  of  the  com- 
mendation which  his  work  had  received  was  undoubt- 
edly due  to  the  zeal  of  personal  friendship,  acting 
either  directly  or  indirectly.  But  this  had  manifestly 
not  been  the  case  in  certain  instances.  Much  of  the 
warm  welcome  which  had  been  extended  to  Tennyson's 
first  poems  had  come  from  independent  and  absolutely 
impartial  sources.  There  is  no  question  that  in  many 
quarters  the  volume  of  1830  had  made  a  distinctly 
favorable  impression  by  its  own  merits. 

None  the  less  had  personal  considerations  played  a 
great  part  in  the  most  important  notices  which  the 
work  had  received.  There  is  no  question  that  in  these 
early  years  Tennyson  was  subjected  to  an  undiscrimi- 
nating  approval  and  even  gross  flattery  which,  had  it 
been  left  unchecked,  would  have  had  a  baleful  effect 


228  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

upon  the  development  of  his  poetic  power.  Up  to  this 
time  he  had  not  produced  a  single  piece  of  the  highest 
class.  He  had  produced  some  which  later  he  himself 
came  to  look  upon  with  distinct  disfavor.  There  was  a 
great  deal  of  promise  in  his  work ;  speaking  compara- 
tively, there  was  little  of  performance.  Had  Tenny- 
son then  died,  the  world  would  not  only  have  remained 
generally  ignorant  of  his  achievement,  but  many  of  the 
few  that  had  come  to  know  it  would  have  been  dis- 
posed to  deny  him  the  capability  of  accomplishing 
anything  that  could  be  deemed  worthy  of  much  con- 
sideration. But  even  at  this  early  period  his  partisans 
insisted  that  he  had  already  accomplished  great  work. 
All  that  was  peculiar  and  sometimes  highly  ornate  was 
celebrated  by  them  as  evidence  of  a  new  and  original 
vein.  All  that  was  vague  was  held  up  as  marking 
depth  of  thought,  as  exhibiting  penetration  into  the 
mysterious  recesses  of  the  soul  into  which  it  was 
granted  to  but  few  to  enter.  ''That  these  poems  will 
have  a  very  rapid  and  extensive  popularity  we  do  not 
anticipate,"  said  'The  Westminster  Review.'  "Their 
very  originality  "will  prevent  their  being  generally 
appreciated  for  a  time."  Originality  there  certainly 
w^as;  but  it  was  not  that  which  stood  in  the  way  of 
their  reception.  There  was  in  truth  a  good  deal  in 
these  early  poems  to  make  a  thoughtful  critic  hesitate. 
With  the  possession  of  a  vein  of  unmistakable  genius 
and  perhaps  great  poetic  power  plainly  indicated, 
there  was  a  certain  proportion  of  magniloquence,  a 
pomp  of  language  too  exalted  for  the  ideas  it  clothed. 
There   were   passages   of   occasional   mistiness,    and 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  REVIEW  229 

what  was  worse,  there  were  at  times  prettinesses  of 
expression,  a  preciosity  indeed  which  indicated  that 
the  Tennyson  of  that  day  was  approaching  danger- 
ously near  the  verge  of  namby-pambyism. 

Even  had  there  been  no  defects  of  this  nature,  it  is 
clear  that  the  unmeasured  laudation  poured  forth 
upon  Tennyson  by  his  friends  would  be  certain  to  meet 
^^^Lth  protest.  If  Parnassus  is  to  be  taken  by  assault, 
it  must  be  by  the  poet  in  person.  It  cannot  be  done 
by  those  who  are  fighting  for  him.  They  can  aid ;  but 
they  can  never  put  him  in  possession.  In  this  instance 
the  eagerness  displayed  by  them  to  celebrate  his 
achievement  did  him  actual  though  temporary  harm. 
The  unwisdom  of  their  course  was  pointed  out  at  this 
early  period  by  Trench,  though  he  was  thinking  rather 
of  the  detriment  "UTOught  to  the  man  himself  than  to 
his  reputation.  In  writing  to  a  correspondent  he 
praised  some  of  Charles  Tennyson's  poems.  "I 
think, ' '  he  added,  ' '  his  brother  may  be  a  much  greater 
poet  even  than  he  is,  but  his  friends  at  Cambridge  will 
materially  injure  him  if  he  does  not  beware ;  no  young 
man  under  any  circumstances  should  believe  he  has 
done  anything,  but  still  be  forward  looking."^  Un- 
fortunately this  was  not  the  sentiment  held  by  his 
young  admirers.  Their  overstrained  enthusiasm  in  his 
behalf  was  not  only  resented,  it  led  to  hostile  demon- 
stration. In  the  end  this  latter  proved  a  distinct  bene- 
fit. From  the  harm  which  would  have  been  wrought 
by    the   indiscriminate    adulation    he    was    receiving, 

1  Letter  to  W.  B.  Donne  of  June  23,  1830,  in  E.  C.  Trench's  'Letters 
and  Memorials,'  Vol.  I,  p.  74. 


230  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

which  sought  to  forestall  public  opinion  and  impose 
upon  it  a  poet  almost  without  asking  its  consent, 
Tennyson  was  saved  by  agencies  which  at  the  time  he 
undoubtedly  looked  upon  with  disfavor. 

There  was  an  ominous  growl  in  what  was  on  the 
whole  a  fairly  favorable  reference  to  Tennyson  which 
appeared  in  the  'Noctes  Ambrosianae'  in  'Blackwood's 
Magazine'  for  February,  1832.  It  followed  one  of 
those  periodic  lamentations  which  came  out  then  with 
the  regularity  of  the  seasons  about  the  decay  that  had 
overtaken  poetry.  Christopher  North  is  represented 
as  saying  that  he  saw  no  new  poets  appearing  above 
the  horizon.  When  he  is  asked  if  there  are  no 
''younkers,"  he  replies: 

''A  few — but  equivocal.  I  have  good  hopes  of 
Alfred  Tennyson.  But  the  Cockneys  are  doing  what 
they  may  to  spoil  him — and  if  he  suffers  them  to  put 
their  bird-lime  on  his  feet,  he  will  stick  all  the  days  of 
his  life  on  hedgerows,  or  leap  fluttering  about  the 
bushes.  I  should  be  sorry  for  it — for  though  his  wings 
are  far  from  being  full-fledged,  they  promise  now  well 
in  the  pinions — and  I  should  not  be  surprised  to  see 
him  yet  a  sky-soarer.  His  'Golden  Days  of  good 
Haroun  Alraschid'  are  extremely  beautiful.  There  is 
feeling — and  fancy — in  his  Oriana.  He  has  a  fine  ear 
for  melody  and  harmony  too — and  rare  and  rich 
glimpses  of  imagination.    He  has — genius." 

To  this  statement  his  interlocutor  replies,  ''Affecta- 
tions." 

"Too  many,"  North  answers.  "But  I  admire 
Alfred — and  hope — nay  trust — that  one  day  he  will 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  REVIEW  231 

prove  himself  a  poet.  If  he  do  not — then  am  I  no 
prophet. ' ' 

This  is  certainly  mingling  a  good  deal  of  praise  with 
a  very  little  censure.  It  indicates,  too,  much  greater 
prescience  than  is  ordinarily  possessed  by  the  astutest 
of  critics.  But  Wilson  was  as  keenly  alive  to  Tenny- 
son's defects  as  he  was  to  his  merits.  Still,  about  the 
former  he  would  probably  have  said  little,  had  not 
his  wrath  been  aroused  by  the  gross  flattery  which  had 
been  heaped  upon  the  poet  under  the  guise  of  criticism. 
In  'Blackwood's  Magazine'  for  the  following  May  he 
returned  to  the  author.  It  was  the  first  attempt  at  a 
discriminating  examination  of  the  poems  which  they 
received;  for  Leigh  Hunt's  article,  while  condemning 
some  of  his  pieces,  had  raised  Tennyson  to  a  height 
to  which  he  had  not  as  yet  attained.  Wilson's  review, 
on  the  contrary,  was  a  careful  effort  to  point  out  what 
was  good  and  what  was  bad  in  the  work  already  accom- 
plished. His  criticism  had  of  course  the  defects  of  its 
writer 's  virtues.  It  was  marked  by  the  contempt  which 
all  of  the  Blackwood  school  of  contributors  felt  or 
professed  to  feel  for  the  body  of  authors  whom  they 
designated  as  Cockneys,  and  who  had  previously  been 
accused  of  doing  what  they  could  to  spoil  Tennyson. 
Wilson  naturally  could  not  refrain  from  the  accus- 
tomed fling.  '*We  shall  not  define  poetry,"  he  said  at 
the  beginning  of  his  review,  "because  the  Cockneys 
have  done  so ;  and  were  they  to  go  to  church,  we  should 
be  strongly  tempted  to  break  the  Sabbath." 

This  feeling  it  was  which  led  Wilson  to  attack  the 
praisers  of  Tennyson  before  he  turned  his  attention 


232  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OP  TENNYSON 

to  the  poet  himself.  He  said  nothing  directly  indeed 
about  Leigh  Hunt,  whom  naturally  he  would  regard  as 
the  chief  of  the  Cockney  school.  His  reticence  may 
have  been  due  to  the  fact  that  with  one  glaring  excep- 
tion the  views  of  the  London  critic  generally  agreed 
with  his  own.  It  was  upon  the  review  in  the  'West- 
minster' and  upon  Hallam's  article  in  'The  English- 
man's Magazine'  that  the  weight  of  his  invective 
mainly  fell.  His  notices  of  them  were  characterized  by 
that  reckless  rowdyism  which  was  apt  to  be  inter- 
mingled with  his  most  serious  utterances.  He  set  out 
with,  the  declaration  that  the  besetting  sin  of  periodical 
criticism  was  boundless  extravagance  of  praise.  None, 
however,  had  been  splashing  it  on  like  the  trowel-men 
who  had  been  bedaubing  Mr.  Tennyson.  Of  him,  he 
said,  the  world  knew  yet  little  or  nothing;  but  though 
his  friends  called  him  a  phcenix,  he  hoped  that  the  poet 
would  not  be  dissatisfied  if  he  designated  him  simply 
as  a  swan.  ''One  of  the  saddest  misfortunes,"  he 
remarked,  "that  can  befall  a  young  poet,  is  to  be  the 
Pet  of  a  Coterie;  and  the  very  saddest  of  all,  if  in 
Cockneydom.  Such  has  been  the  unlucky  lot  of  Alfred 
Tennyson.  He  has  been  elevated  to  the  throne  of 
Little  Britain,  and  sonnets  were  showered  over  his 
coronation  from  the  most  remote  regions  of  his 
empire,  even  from  Hampstead  Hill." 

Before  setting  out  to  remove  a  good  deal  of  the 
plaster  with  which  Tennyson  had  been  bedaubed,  Wil- 
son felt  it  incumbent  to  express  his  contempt  for  the 
plasterers.  Of  these  Hallam  was  the  first  to  fall  under 
his  lash.    He  professed  to  believe  that  it  was  his  article 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  REVIEW  233 

which  killed  the  magazine  in  which  it  appeared.  * '  The 
Englishman's  Magazine,"  he  wrote,  ''ought  not  to 
have  died ;  for  it  threatened  to  be  a  very  pleasant  peri- 
odical. An  Essay  '  On  the  Genius  of  Alfred  Tennyson ' 
sent  it  to  the  grave.  The  superhuman — nay,  super- 
natural— pomposity  of  that  one  paper,  incapacitated 
the  whole  work  for  living  one  day  longer  in  this  uncere- 
monious world.  The  solemnity  with  which  the  critic 
approached  the  object  of  his  adoration,  and  the  sanc- 
tity with  which  he  laid  his  offerings  on  the  shrine,  were 
too  much  for  our  irreligious  age.  The  Essay  'On  the 
Genius  of  Alfred  Tennyson,'  awoke  a  general  guffaw, 
and  it  expired  in  con\nilsions.  Yet  the  Essay  was 
exceedingly  well-written — as  well  as  if  it  had  been  '  On 
the  Genius  of  Sir  Isaac  Newton. '  Therein  lay  the  mis- 
take. Sir  Isaac  discovered  the  law  of  gravitation; 
Alfred  had  but  written  some  pretty  verses,  and  man- 
kind were  not  prepared  to  set  him  among  the  stars. 
But  that  he  has  genius  is  proved  by  his  being  at  this 
moment  alive ;  for  had  he  not,  he  must  have  breathed 
his  last  under  that  critique.  The  spirit  of  life  must 
indeed  be  strong  within  him;  for  he  has  outlived  a 
narcotic  dose  administered  to  him  by  a  crazy  charlatan 
in  the  Westminster,  and  after  that  he  may  sleep  in 
safety  with  a  pan  of  charcoal. ' ' 

Wilson  now  set  out,  as  he  said,  to  do  justice  to  this 
ingenious  lad,  as  he  termed  Tennyson.  His  object  was 
to  save  him  from  his  worst  enemies,  his  friends.  Praise 
he  should  have,  but  not  in  lavish  profusion.  "Were  we 
not  afraid,"  he  wrote,  "that  our  style  might  be 
thought  to  wax  too   figurative,  we   should   say  that 


234  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

Alfred  is  a  promising  plant;  and  that  the  day  may 
come  when,  beneath  sun  and  shower,  his  genius  may 
grow  up  and  expand  into  a  stately  tree,  embowering  a 
solemn  shade  within  its  wide  circumference,  while  the 
daylight  lies  gorgeously  on  its  crest,  seen  from  afar 
in  glory — ^itself  a  grove."  But  such  a  day  would  never 
come,  Wilson  assured  him,  if  he  did  not  hearken  to  the 
advice  of  his  critic.  ''We  desire  to  see  him  prosper," 
he  remarked;  "and  we  predict  fame  as  the  fruit  of 
obedience.  If  he  disobey,  he  assuredly  goes  to  obliv- 
ion. ' '  In  the  spirit  of  the  loving  chastener  he  prefaced 
his  praise  by  a  number  of  blows  from  the  accompany- 
ing crutch  with  which  he  was  wont  to  deal  out  punish- 
ment to  those  in  need  of  correction. 

Wilson  first  proceeded  to  point  out  poems  in  this 
volume  which  struck  him  as  failures.  The  list  was  a 
fairly  long  one ;  and  it  must  be  admitted  that  his  stric- 
tures were  not  distinguished  by  any  restraint  in  the 
use  of  vituperative  epithets.  The  'National  Song'  he 
characterized  as  miserable,  as  also  the  'English  War 
Song.'  Both  were  fully  entitled  to  the  adjective.  'We 
are  Free'  was  drivel,  'Lost  Hope'  was  more  dismal 
drivel.  Even  more  dismal  drivel  still  was  'Love,  Pride, 
and  Forgetfulness. '  All  these  he  accused  of  a  painful 
and  impotent  straining  after  originality,  and  aversion 
from  the  straightforward  and  strong  simplicity  of 
nature  and  truth.  The  sonnet  beginning  'Shall  the 
Hag  Evil  die  with  child  of  Good'  gave,  he  said,  the 
impression  of  being  idiotic.  The  piece  entitled  'The 
Poet's  Mind'  was  mostly  silly,  some  of  it  prettyish, 
scarcely  one  line  of  it  all  true  poetry.     'The  How 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  REVIEW  235 

and  the  Why'  was  from  beginning  to  end  a  clumsy 
and  unwieldy  failure.  The  pervading  characteristic  of 
'The  Merman'  was  a  distinguished  silliness.  The  same 
impression  appears  to  have  been  created  on  the  critic's 
mind  by  'The  Mermaid'  and  'The  Sea-Fairies.'  The 
two  pieces  'Nothing  will  Die'  and  'All  Things  will 
Die,'  so  highly  praised  in  the  'Westminster,'  were 
only  two  feeble  and  fantastic  strains.  The  poems  on 
the  various  members  of  the  animal  creation  further 
excited  Wilson's  wrath.  'The  Djing  Swan'  he  pro- 
fessed himself  unable  to  understand;  but  as  he  had 
heard  Hartley  Coleridge  praise  the  piece,  he  consented 
to  believe  that  the  lines  must  be  fine.  As  for  'The 
Grasshopper,'  Alfred  was  said  to  chirp  and  chirrup, 
though  with  less  meaning  and  more  monotony,  than  a 
cricket.  The  two  songs  to  'The  Owl'  next  fell  under 
condenmation,  and  Wilson  wound  up  his  attack  by 
assailing  'The  Kraken'  which  he  regarded  as  incom- 
prehensible. 

It  cannot  justly  be  said  that  a  tone  of  geniality  per- 
vades comment  of  this  sort.  Some  of  the  extracts 
given  by  Wilson — especially  those  which  the  writer 
in  the  'Westminster'  had  adduced  as  to  the  poet  having 
the  secret  of  the  transmigration  of  souls — had  been 
selected  for  censure  not  so  much  to  express  contempt 
for  them  as  for  their  critic.  This  reviewer  Wilson 
styled  at  various  times  and  in  various  places  in  his 
article  on  the  poems  as  a  crazy  charlatan,  a  quack,  a 
speculative  sumph — a  Scotch  word  for  'dunce' — but 
most  frequently  as  the  Young  Tailor.  One  of  the  sen- 
tences about  him  is  worth  quoting  as  a  specimen  of  the 


236  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

chastened  style  of  critical  disapproval  then  in  use, 
especially  among  the  contributors  to  'Blackwood's 
Magazine.'  Wilson  cited  an  extract  from  the  article 
of  the  reviewer  he  was  attacking  and  then  proceeded 
to  comment  upon  it  after  this  fashion.  ''We  could 
quote,"  he  said,  "another  couple  of  critics" — he  must 
have  meant  Leigh  Hunt  and  Hallam — "but  as  the 
force  of  nature  could  no  farther  go,  and  as  to  make  one 
fool  she  joined  the  other  two,  we  keep  to  the  West- 
minster. It  is  a  perfect  specimen  of  the  super-hyper- 
bolical ultra-extravagance  of  outrageous  Cockney 
eulogistic  foolishness,  vdth  which  not  even  a  quantity 
of  common  sense  less  than  nothing  has  been  suffered, 
for  an  indivisible  moment  of  time,  to  mingle ;  the  purest 
mere  matter  of  moonshine  ever  mouthed  by  an  idiot- 
lunatic,  slavering  in  the  palsied  dotage  of  the  extrem- 
est  superannuation  ever  inflicted  on  a  being,  long  ago, 
perhaps,  in  some  slight  respects  and  in  low  degrees 
human,  but  now  sensibly  and  audibly  reduced  below 
the  level  of  the  Pongos." 

This  is  a  specimen  of  the  art  of  criticism  as  prac- 
tised in  the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth  century  by  one 
of  its  very  foremost  professors.  But  the  vehemence 
of  the  language,  low  as  well  as  loud-mouthed  as  it  fre- 
quently is,  must  not  prevent  us  from  recognizing  the 
good  sense  that  underlay  many  of  the  views  expressed. 
It  would  be  besides  a  gross  mistake  to  fancy  that  the 
passages  cited  and  opinions  given  furnish  a  true  con- 
ception of  this  noted  article.  There  is  this  to  be  said 
in  the  first  place  that  in  a  number  of  instances  the 
whole  or  at  least  a  large  part  of  the  piece  condemned 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  REVIEW  237 

was  printed.  The  reader  consequently,  if  lie  had  any 
critical  sense — which,  to  be  sure,  he  usually  has  not — 
was  supplied  with  the  means  of  forming  his  own 
opinion.  In  the  instance  of  *  The  Poet's  Mind,'  Wilson 
said  that  as  it  had  been  admired  by  several,  he  quoted 
it  entire,  so  that  if  he  were  in  error,  the  author  would 
triumph  over  the  critic,  and  Christopher  North  stand 
rebuked  before  the  superior  genius  of  Alfred  Tenny- 
ton.  But,  furthermore,  while  he  gave  up  half  of  his 
article  to  heaping  abuse  upon  Tennyson's  adulators 
and  upon  a  number  of  the  poet's  own  productions,  the 
second  half  was  wholly  devoted  to  his  praise.  "Hav- 
ing shown,"  said  he,  "by  gentle  chastisement  that  we 
love  Alfred  Tennyson,  let  us  now-  show  by  judicious 
eulogy  that  we  admire  him ;  and,  by  well-chosen  speci- 
mens of  his  fine  faculties,  that  he  is  worthy  of  our 
admiration. ' ' 

He  carried  out  this  intention  fully.  Wilson  quoted 
in  most  laudatory  terms  the  part  or  more  usually  the 
whole  of  several  poems — the  'Ode  to  Memory,'  'The 
Deserted  House,'  'A  Dirge,'  'Isabel,'  'Mariana,' 
'Adeline,'  'The  Sleeping  Beauty,'  'Oriana,'  and 
'Recollections  of  the  Arabian  Nights.'  It  is  a  singu- 
lar illustration  of  the  different  effect  wrought  upon  two 
persons,  specially  susceptible  to  poetic  influences,  that 
this  last-named  poem,  which  Leigh  Hunt  had  disposed 
of  so  cavalierly,  was  reckoned  by  Wilson  the  highest 
of  all  Tennyson's  achievements.  He  printed  it  in  full. 
He  further  declared  himself  in  love  with  all  the  poet's 
maidens  in  addition  to  those  already  mentioned — with 
Claribel  and  Lilian,  with  Hero  and  Almeida.    Indeed, 


238  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

as  he  approached  the  conclusion  he  half  apologized  for 
the  pre\ious  language  of  depreciation.  He  declared, 
in  correcting  the  critique  for  the  press,  he  had  come  to 
see  that  its  whole  merit,  which  was  great,  consisted  in 
the  extracts.  ''Perhaps,"  he  said,  ''in  the  first  part 
of  our  article,  we  may  have  exaggerated  Mr.  Tenny- 
son's not  unfrequent  silliness,  for  we  are  apt  to  be 
carried  away  by  the  whim  of  the  moment,  and  in  our 
humorous  moods,  many  things  wear  a  queer  look  to 
our  aged  eyes,  which  fill  young  pupils  with  tears ;  but 
we  feel  assured  that  in  the  second  part  we  have  not 
exaggerated  his  strength — that  we  have  done  no  more 
than  justice  to  his  fine  faculties — and  that  the  millions 
who  delight  in  Maga  will,  with  one  voice,  confirm  our 
judgment — that  Alfred  Tennyson  is  a  poet."  With 
some  further  words  of  advice  and  warning  ended  an 
article  which  was  indirectly  destined  to  have  a  marked 
influence  over  Tennyson's  literary  fortunes  during  the 
years  immediately  following. 

Before  taking  up,  as  will  be  done  in  subsequent  chap- 
ters, the  consideration  of  the  part  which  this  review 
was  incidentally  to  play  in  the  history  of  Tennyson's 
reputation,  the  question  naturally  arises:  Can  it  be 
deemed  unfair? — unfair,  of  course,  in  what  was  said, 
not  in  the  way  in  which  it  was  said.  We  know  that 
in  the  mind  of  the  poet,  mth  his  peculiar  susceptibility 
to  critical  censure,  it  awakened  deep  irritation.  So  it 
did  in  the  little  circle  which  surrounded  him.  Hallam 
was  naturally  indignant ;  for  the  blow  from  the  crutch 
which  Christopher  North  professed  to  wield,  fell  as 
heavily  upon  him  as  upon  the  man  he  had  praised — 


CHKISTOPHER  NORTH'S  REVIEW  239 

in  fact,  more  so.  But  he,  as  well  as  the  other  critics 
singled  out  for  disparagement,  was  wise  enough  to 
keep  silence.  Not  so,  in  this  instance,  was  Tennyson. 
His  action  was  contrary  to  his  usual  custom.  There 
were  two  occasions  in  his  life  in  which  he  allowed  his 
resentment  to  overcome  his  natural  disposition.  In 
the  one  case  he  was  fully  justified  in  the  reply  he  made 
to  an  unprovoked  attack;  and  his  retort  not  merely 
silenced  his  assailant,  but  prevented  any  further  pub- 
lic display  of  the  antagonism  which  at  heart  he  con- 
tinued to  feel.  Yet  even  of  this  reply,  fully  warranted 
as  it  was,  Tennyson  almost  immediately  repented.  He 
regretted  its  publication.  But  in  the  present  instance 
there  was  no  real  ground  for  the  retort  which  he  made 
not  hastily,  but  after  fullest  deliberation.  Happy 
would  it  have  been  for  his  peace  of  mind,  happier  still 
for  his  immediate  success,  if  he  had  left  entirely  to 
others  protest  against  the  action  taken  by  the  critic. 

For  such  protest  there  was.  It  came  too  from 
sources  outside  of  the  circle  of  Tennyson's  enthu- 
siastic Cambridge  friends.  The  boisterous  character 
of  Wilson's  article  with  its  alternate  contumelious 
and  commendatory  utterances  naturally  attracted 
attention  everj^iere.  'The  Spectator,'  for  instance, 
in  a  review  of  the  May  magazines,  spoke  of  this 
particular  article  as  the  only  one  in  the  'Blackwood' 
of  that  month  worth  reading.  It  led  the  critic  to 
designate  it  as  an  extravaganza  on  account  of  the 
alternate  blame  and  praise  it  gave.  "When  Wilson 
sits  down  to  write,"  said  'The  Spectator,'  "the  world 
appears  to  him  a  mere  game  at  nine-pins  or  perhaps 


240  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

he  is  the  incarnation  of  the  immortal  Punch — he  sets 
all  law  at  defiance,  slaps,  bangs,  and  stabs  both 
friends  and  foes,  and  all  in  the  merest  gayety  of  heart. 
In  the  article  we  are  speaking  of,  which  is  on  the  poems 
of  Alfred  Tennyson  (a  young  poet  of  genuine  talent), 
Mr.  Wilson  first  sets  to  and  abuses,  with  a  charming 
play  of  the  imagination  and  an  unsparing  application 
of  slang,  Mr.  Tennyson  and  all  his  critics;  he  seems 
animated  with  the  bitterest  contempt  for  the  whole 
party,  and  withheld  no  opprobrium;  the  poet's  imbe- 
cility is  proved  by  extracts  of  every  kind;  and  the 
critics  fall  of  course  with  the  work  they  have  praised. 
When  the  unhappy  bard  is  sufficiently  bespattered — 
after  he  has  been  laid  prostrate,  has  been  pommeled 
and  bruised,  with  all  the  means  of  annoyance  that 
science  and  bottom  can  apply  to  his  discomfiture, — 
the  writer  seems,  not  to  repent  of  his  work,  but  seized 
with  a  sudden  passion  of  setting  up  the  idol  he  had 
pulled  down.  The  miserable  spectacle  of  a  poet  is 
raised  on  high ;  although  the  dirt  is  not  cleared  away, 
it  is  gilded  over  with  praise  as  hearty  as  the  abuse; 
and  the  Ebonite  retires  with  the  satisfaction  of  having 
both  unmade  and  made  a  poet.  This  is  the  last  trick 
of  our  Periodical  Punch;  he  is  a  fellow  of  infinite  wit 
and  talent,  but  as  to  their  employment  he  has  never 
yet  been  troubled  with  any  conscientious  scruples. ' " 

In  no  brief  time  Tennyson  came  to  have  ample 
reason  for  regretting  the  exhibition  of  the  anger, 
which,  as  we  shall  see,  he  was  led  to  express.  But  was 
there  much  real  ground  for  dissatisfaction?    That  the 

1' Spectator,'  May  5,  1832,  p.  424. 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  REVIEW  241 

article  was  written,  at  least  a  good  deal  of  it,  in  the 
rough  rollicking  style  which  characterized  the  re\4ews 
found  in  the  'Blackwood'  of  that  early  period,  it  is 
needless  to  remark.     That  magazine  did  not  always 
treat  with  respect  the  writers  it  really  reverenced. 
No  one  was  safe  from  its  attacks.     The  foibles  and 
weaknesses  of  Wordsworth  were  at  times  mercilessly 
pointed  out  in  the  periodical  which  had  done  most  of 
all  to  exalt  him  and  to  convert  unpopularity  or  indif- 
ference into  partisanship.     Naturally  if  Wordsworth 
could  not  escape,  there  was  little  likelihood  of  a  new- 
comer being  treated  with  excessive  courtesy.    In  this 
instance  he  was   certainly  not.     Besides   the   direct 
denuxLciation  of  particular  pieces  in  the  article,  the 
tone  of  patronage  running  through  it  was  unquestion- 
ably offensive.    To  a  man  who  had  already  achieved 
great  reputation  it  would  have  been  in  the  grossest 
possible  bad  taste,  though  it  is  unnecessary  to  add  that 
this    fact   would   not   have    prevented   Wilson    from 
exhibiting  it,  if  the  whim  had  chanced  to  seize  him. 
But  we  have  to  bear  in  mind  that  Tennyson  at  that 
time  was  scarcely  known  outside  of  a  very  limited 
circle.     Accordingly  can  the  review  as   a  whole  be 
deemed   unfavorable?     Against   the    unsparing   con- 
demnation of  about  half  of  the  poems  mentioned  in  it 
and  the  tone  of  condescension  which  pervades  all  of  it, 
must  be  set  the  unstinted  praise  of  particular  pieces  and 
above    everything    else    the    ungrudging    recognition 
that  at  last  had  come  a  man  who,  if  his  powers  were 
developed  along  the  right  lines,  would  become  a  poet 
whom  the  world  would  honor. 


242  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

Tennyson  came  to  be  almost  universally  recognized 
by  his  contemporaries  as  the  supreme  poet  of  the 
Victorian  era — by  nearly  all  of  them,  it  may  fairly  be 
added,  whose  opinions  are  entitled  to  much  consid- 
eration. Of  course  there  was  no  time  in  his  career 
in  which  he  was  not  to  some  extent  the  mark  of  hostile 
criticism — coming  too,  though  in  a  very  few  instances, 
from  men  of  recognized  ability.  That  is  an  experience 
which  no  man  of  genius  has  ever  escaped  or  ever  will 
escape.  But  in  general  it  may  be  confidently  said  that 
the  later  attitude  towards  him  of  the  cultivated  public 
was  never  seriously  affected  or  his  own  reputation 
shaken  by  the  attacks  of  his  depredators.  This  body 
of  censurers,  too,  was  largely  made  up  of  broken- 
winded  poets  and  broken-down  critics.  Nor  has  this 
estimate  been  really  disturbed  since  his  death,  as  the 
steady  sale  of  his  works  proves  conclusively.  Yet  it 
may  also  be  said  that  to  many  of  the  warmest  of  his 
later  admirers,  Wilson's  review  will  seem — as  regards 
its  matter,  not  its  manner — to  have  erred  on  the  side 
of  partiality.  It  is  doubtless  an  unneeded  proof  of  the 
finer  and  keener  critical  sense  of  Christopher  North 
as  compared  with  most  modern  students  of  literature, 
that  with  all  the  knowledge  we  possess  of  what  Tenny- 
son was  and  actually  accomplished,  few  there  are  who 
would  now  be  disposed  to  accredit  him  with  genius 
of  a  very  high  order  on  the  strength  of  the  poems 
contained  in  the  volume  of  1830. 

That  the  work  in  question  displayed  poetic  ability 
was  certain.  But  there  are  many  young  writers  who 
display  poetic  ability  who  never  reach  the  height  of 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  REVIEW  243 

poetic  power.  Nor  will  many  modern  readers  share 
in  the  intense  admiration  which  Wilson  bestowed  upon 
the  Lilians,  Claribels,  Adelines,  Isabels,  and  other 
somewhat  vague  female  characters  which  flit  through 
so  many  pages  of  Tennyson's  early  poetry.  They 
certainly  disappeared  in  process  of  time  from  the  view 
of  the  general  public.  It  is  fairly  safe  to  assert,  with 
little  danger  of  the  statement  being  successfully  chal- 
lenged, that  were  it  not  for  his  succeeding  work,  not 
one  educated  man  in  ten  thousand  would  know  that 
these  fanciful  beings  had  ever  existed  at  all.  They 
were  in  a  way  attractive;  but  it  was  the  novelty  of 
these  characterizations  that  made  them  attractive,  not 
so  much  the  characterizations  themselves.  Nor  are 
the  w^armest  admirers  of  the  poet  now  likely  to  deny 
that  in  the  first  volume  were  some  dreadful  things. 
That  Tennyson  came  to  think  so  himself  before  the 
review  in  'Blackwood's  Magazine'  appeared,  we  know 
from  incontestable  sources.  These  admissions  ought 
to  be  made  here  because  the  later  attitude  of  Wilson 
to  the  poet  reveals  him,  as  will  be  seen,  as  clearly  in 
the  wrong  as  in  this  case  he  was  in  the  right. 

Before  the  publication  of  his  next  volume  of  verse 
Tennyson  was  drawn  into  contributing  to  a  number 
of  periodical  publications  then  in  much  vogue.  These 
collectively  were  called  the  Annuals.  During  the 
period  of  the  poet's  youth  they  occupied  a  conspicuous 
though  not  an  important  place  in  the  literature  of  the 
transition  period.  Their  full  history  has  never  been 
written;  by  some,  perhaps  by  many,  it  wiU  not  be 
thought  worth  writing.    Yet  for  the  part  they  played 


244  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

in  the  literary  activities  of  the  second  quarter  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  for  the  number  of  great  names 
they  enrolled  in  their  list  of  contributors,  but  here, 
in  particular,  for  the  connection,  slight  as  it  was,  which 
Tennyson  had  with  them,  a  brief  history  of  their  origin 
and  character  can  hardly  be  deemed  out  of  place. 
Consequently  before  proceeding  to  the  account  of  his 
second  poetical  venture,  the  story  of  the  Annuals  and 
of  his  contributions  to  them  will  form  the  subject  of 
the  following  chapter.  In  order  to  make  this  part 
of  the  subject  complete  in  itself,  so  far  as  he  is  con- 
cerned, it  will  include  the  consideration  of  all  the  pieces 
of  his  which  appeared  in  publications  of  this  nature 
before  the  appearance  of  the  'Poems'  of  1842. 


CHAPTER  IX 
THE  ANNUALS 

Paet  One 
The  Origin  and  History  of  the  Annuals 

In  the  history  of  literature,  at  least  of  modern  liter- 
ature, there  appears  at  pretty  regular  intervals  a 
class  of  productions  which  strike  the  popular  fancy 
and  meet  for  a  while  with  phenomenal  success. 
Usually  they  are  of  the  nature  of  periodical  publica- 
tions. As  extent  of  circulation  is  the  main  object  of 
their  promoters,  with  the  pecuniary  results  that  attend 
it,  the  aim  of  these  persons  is  to  gain  for  their  enter- 
prise the  benefit  of  great  or  at  least  well-known  names. 
They  frequently  secure  the  men;  they  rarely  secure 
the  expected  corresponding  matter.  One  gets,  in 
truth,  from  examining  most  of  this  class  of  productions 
the  impression  that  there  seems  to  be  among  the  best 
authors,  who  contribute  to  them,  a  real,  though 
unavowed,  determination  to  do  their  worst;  to  see 
just  how  badly  they  can  write ;  as  if  periodical  publi- 
cations of  this  kind  had  been  set  up  mainly  for  the 
purpose  of  carrying  off  the  literary  refuse  which  had 
been  stored  away  in  the  garrets  of  the  great;  or 
perhaps  for  offering  a  safe  means  for  the  expulsion 


246  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

of  certain  noxious  intellectual  humors  wliich  had  been 
fermenting  in  their  brains. 

Students  of  literary  history  can  call  to  mind  the 
existence  at  various  periods  of  several  sorts  of  publi- 
cations which  fulfilled  the  functions  just  described. 
The  work  they  are  wont  to  accomplish  was  performed 
in  the  second  quarter  of  the  nineteenth  century  by 
what  were  then  called  the  Annuals.  Their  origin 
belongs  to  the  early  part  of  the  third  decade.  In  the 
London  papers  of  November  and  December,  1822, 
appears  an  advertisement  inserted  by  Rudolph  Acker- 
mann,  a  fine-art  publisher,  who  was  well  and  widely 
known  for  the  illustrated  books  and  periodicals  he 
was  in  the  habit  of  bringing  out.  It  ran  to  this  effect : 
<' Forget  Me  Not;  or  Annual  Pocket  Chronicle,  to  serve 
as  a  token  of  Friendship  and  Affection  at  the  approach- 
ing season;  with  thirteen  highly-finished  engravings 
by  Agar;  containing  interesting  Tales,  Poetry,  a 
Chronicle  of  Eemarkable  Events,  a  Genealogy  of  the 
Reigning  Sovereigns  and  their  Families,  a  list  of  the 
Ambassadors  at  the  different  courts,  and  a  variety 
of  other  useful  articles  of  reference."  Then  followed 
the  description  and  price  of  the  volume. 

This  book,  bearing  the  date  of  1823,  was  the  pioneer 
of  the  publications  specifically  styled  the  Annuals. 
These  for  the  next  twenty  years  occupied  a  con- 
spicuous if  not  an  important  position  in  the  literature 
of  the  times.  They  did  not  die  out  entirely  till  more 
than  thirty  years  had  gone  by.  As  will  be  inferred 
from  the  advertisement,  the  volume  was  originally 
planned  for  people  of  diverse  tastes.    It  had  engrav- 


ORIGIN  AND  HISTORY  OF  THE  ANNUALS     247 

ings  for  those  who  thought  themselves  fond  of  the  fine 
arts.  It  had  poetry  and  fiction  for  those  who  consid- 
ered themselves  lovers  of  literature.  Besides  all  this 
it  appealed  to  that  thirst  for  useful  information  which 
is  supposed  to  spring  perennial  in  the  human  heart. 
It  furnished  a  collection  of  facts,  especially  about  the 
courts  of  Europe,  their  rulers  and  the  diplomatic 
bodies  connected  with  them,  which,  it  was  assumed, 
would  make  it  of  especial  value  for  consultation  and 
reference.  For  those^,  too,  who  were  fond  of  statistics 
the  population  of  the  principal  cities  of  the  globe  was 
given. 

The  venture  must  have  been  successful.  Not  only 
did  a  second  volume  come  from  the  same  publishing 
house  at  the  end  of  the  following  year,  but  another 
work  of  a  similar  character  was  brought  out  by  a 
London  bookseller,  named  Lupton  Relfe.  Its  title  was 
*  Friendship 's  Offering,  or  the  Annual  Remembrancer. ' 
This  was  described  in  the  advertisement  which  ap- 
peared towards  the  end  of  1823  as  a  Christmas 
Present  and  a  New  Year's  Gift  for  the  year  1824. 
''This  little  volume,"  it  added,  ''in  addition  to  the 
usual  pocket-book  information,  contains  a  series  of 
highly  finished  continental  views  by  artists  of  the  first 
eminence,  two  very  splendid  emblazoned  title-pages, 
a  presentation  plate  and  other  embellishments.  It 
contains  also  a  new  Tale  of  Temper,  several  original 
poems  by  Mrs.  Opie,  songs,  quadrilles.  Intended  to 
imitate  the  long  and  highly  celebrated  continental 
pocket-books. ' ' 

These  two  works— 'The  Forget  Me  Not'  for  1823 


248  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

and  for  1824,  and  ^Friendship's  Offering'  for  1824^ 
are  the  Annuals  in  their  first  stage.  As  has  been  seen, 
they  were  avowedly  imitated  from  the  Almanachs  and 
Taschenbuchs  which  had  long  been  in  use  in  Germany. 
They  contained  a  certain  portion  of  purely  literary 
matter  with  a  sprinkling  of  historical  and  statistical. 
Their  aim  consequently  was  to  appeal  on  the  one  side 
to  the  lovers  of  fashion  and  amusement,  on  the  other 
to  those  in  pursuit  of  useful  knowledge.  The  two  aims 
are  not  absolutely  incompatible,  but  experience  has 
demonstrated  that  from  a  business  point  of  view  they 
ordinarily  succeed  best  when  prosecuted  separately. 
This  fact  had  not  escaped  the  attention  of  a  man  of 
letters  who  had  the  peculiar  gifts  which  fitted  him 
to  gain  distinction  in  the  management  of  undertakings 
of  this  kind.  The  person  alluded  to  was  Alaric 
Alexander  Watts,  who  in  contemporary  literature  had 
the  Hunnish  Attila  frequently  added  to  his  Gothic 
personal  name,  in  place  of  the  Alexander,  with  v/hich 
he  had  been  baptized.  In  1824  he  was  successful  in 
persuading  the  publishing  house  of  Hurst  and  Robin- 
son to  engage  in  the  production  of  a  literary  and 
artistic  miscellany  on  certain  lines  which  he  had 
marked  out.  These  were  distinctly  different  from 
what  had  prevailed  before.    Accordingly  in  November, 

1824,  came  out  under  his  editorship  'The  Literary 
Souvenir,   or   Cabinet  of  Poetry  and  Romance'   for 

1825.  This  new  venture  discarded  everything  entirely 
which  partook  of  a  temporary  nature.  It  contained 
nothing  in  the  shape  of  useful  information.  It  pan- 
dered to  no  diseased  appetite  for  statistics.    It  even 


ORIGIN  AND  HISTORY  OF  THE  ANNUALS     249 

abolished  the  almanac.  It  based  its  claim  to  favor 
largely  upon  the  contributions  of  as  many  of  the  most 
famous  writers  of  the  day  as  could  be  obtained,  but 
also  upon  embellishments  by  well-known  engravers. 
On  this  latter  feature  special  stress  was  laid. 

The  undertaking  was  looked  upon  by  those  concerned 
in  it  as  an  experiment.  But  in  that  condition  it  did  not 
remain  long.  Even  before  its  publication  its  success 
had  become  assured  in  the  minds  of  both  projector 
and  publisher.  At  first  it  was  thought  that  as  many 
as  2,000  copies  could  be  printed  with  safety.  Then 
the  number  fixed  upon  rose  successively  to  3,000,  to 
4,000,  to  5,000  copies,  and  finally  settled  upon  6,000. 
The  book  had  not  been  out  two  weeks  before  the  pub- 
lisher sent  to  the  projector  an  exulting  psean  on  its 
triumph,  and  the  failure  of  envious  rivals  to  retard 
its  majestic  march  to  supremacy.  He  made  no  secret 
of  the  serene  satisfaction  he  felt  in  contemplation  of 
the  noble  motives  which  animated  his  own  course — 
emotions  which  are  apt  to  sway  the  minds  of  men 
when  things  are  moving  in  a  way  to  suit  themselves. 
*'We  are  going  on  gloriously,"  wrote  Robinson  to 
Watts,  "with  the  *  Literary  Souvenir';  and  altogether 
living  above  the  malice  of  our  enemies;  and  enjoy  in 
our  own  breasts  nobler  feelings,  pursuing  the  direct 
course  of  business,  disregarding  all  tricks,  and  selling 
more  books  than  they!  You  may  rely  upon  it,  next 
year  we  will  sell  ten  thousand  copies." 

The  success  of  the  new  publication  was  so  pro- 
nounced that  there  was  nothing  for  the  rival  firms  to 
do  but  to  follow  in  the  path  which  'The  Literary 


250  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

Souvenir'  had  marked  out.  It  further  led  to  the 
setting  on  foot  of  numerous  undertakings  of  a  similar 
character.  There  sprang  up  in  consequence  a  mush- 
room growth  of  these  publications  which  threatened 
to  destroy  the  prosperity  of  all  by  reducing  the  profits 
of  each  to  an  inadequate  amount.  Their  common  aim 
was  to  secure  the  finest  engravings  for  the  embellish- 
ment of  the  volume  in  question  and  to  enroll  the  most 
celebrated  names  among  their  contributors.  For  a 
while,  their  increasing  number  did  not  interfere  with 
their  success.  Towards  the  end  of  the  third  decade 
of  the  century  the  struggle  between  the  various  sorts 
of  these  publications  already  established  and  the  new 
ones  constantly  projected  may  fairly  be  described  as 
fierce.  Annuals  were  devised  to  meet  the  tastes,  the 
feelings,  and  the  prejudices  of  particular  classes.  If 
one  succeeded,  an  imitation  of  it  was  sure  to  follow. 
For  instance,  'The  Amulet,'  founded  by  Samuel  Carter 
Hall,  came  out  in  1826,  with  an  avowed  appeal  for 
support  to  the  religious  community.  This  was  plainly 
indicated  by  its  sub-title  of  'Christian  and  Literary 
Remembrancer.'  As  might  be  expected,  a  similar 
publication  called  '  The  Iris '  soon  made  its  appearance. 
In  truth,  it  was  not  long  before  Annuals  came  into 
existence  which  touched  upon  every  subject  in  which 
the  human  mind  is,  or  appears  to  be,  interested. 
There  were  geographical  Annuals;  there  were  mis- 
sionary Annuals;  there  were  biblical  Annuals;  there 
were  botanical  Annuals;  there  were  musical  Annuals, 
and  inevitably  a  number  of  comic  Annuals,  of  which 
Hood's  was  the  most  successful,  and  retains  even  to 


ORIGIN  AND  HISTORY  OF  THE  ANNUALS    251 

this  day  something  of  the  original  reputation  it  then 
acquired.  Appeals  were  made  also  to  local  and 
national  feeling.  There  were  provincial  Annuals; 
there  were  English  Annuals;  there  were  Scottish 
Annuals;  there  were  British  Annuals.  It  was  about 
the  beginning  of  the  fourth  decade  that  publications 
of  this  nature  showed  the  most  distinct  tendency  to 
specialize.  This  was  particularly  true  of  those  of 
them  in  which  the  pictorial  was  designedly  made  the 
main  attraction.  Of  this  class,  there  sprang  up  among 
others  oriental  Annuals,  landscape  Annuals,  conti- 
nental Annuals.  These  finally  reached  their  culmina- 
tion in  such  publications  as  'The  Book  of  Beauty' 
and  'Finden's  Drawing  Room  Scrapbook.'  There 
were  other  classes  besides.  As  early  as  1829,  juvenile 
Annuals  appeared  on  the  scene  and  for  several 
years  maintained  themselves  successfully.  Even 
infant  Annuals  were  brought  out.  Furthermore,  an 
Annual — 'Le  Keepsake  Frangais' — appeared  in  the 
French  tongue.  It  was  published  both  at  Paris  and 
London,  but  it  is  from  the  latter  place  that  the 
inspiration  for  its  existence  manifestly  came.  On  the 
list  of  its  contributors  appear  the  names  of  some  of 
the  most  eminent  Frenchmen  of  letters.  For  instance, 
in  its  second  volume — that  for  1831 — are  to  be  found 
articles  by  Beranger,  Chateaubriand,  Dumas,  Merimee, 
Victor  Hugo,  Lamartine,  Sainte-Beuve. 

The  most  serious  rival  of  the  original  Annuals  was 
*  The  Keepsake, '  undertaken  by  Charles  Heath,  a  noted 
engraver  of  the  time.  It  first  appeared  towards  the 
end  of  1826.     From  the  outset  this  publication  was 


252  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

remarkable  in  several  ways,  and  later  it  became  even 
more  so.  It  was  projected  on  a  much  more  elaborate 
and  expensive  scale  than  any  of  the  Annuals  which 
had  preceded  it.  Against  the  dozen  or  so  of  engrav- 
ings furnished  by  its  predecessors,  it  contained  twenty- 
one.  It  was  sold  for  a  guinea  while  their  price  had 
been  but  twelve  shillings.  Much  money  was  spent  on 
the  illustrations ;  some  even  of  the  smaller  plates  cost 
from  a  hundred  to  a  hundred  and  fifty  guineas.  The 
contributors  to  the  first  volume  of  this  Annual  were 
anonymous,  but  the  engravings  had  made  the  work 
so  successful  that  in  the  volumes  succeeding  the  initial 
one  of  1827,  names  were  attached.  The  work  became 
particularly  noted  for  its  list  of  titled  contributors, 
the  nobles,  the  honorables  and  the  right  honorables, 
both  men  and  women.  In  consequence  it  speedily 
assumed  a  specially  aristocratic  and  exclusive  char- 
acter, the  rank  of  the  writer  frequently  supplying  the 
lack  of  merit  in  the  writing.  This  distinguishing  trait 
was  remarked  as  early  as  the  volume  for  1832.  ' '  The 
Keepsake,"  said  'The  Literary  Gazette'  of  October  1, 
1831,  **has  the  most  aristocratic  list  of  contributors — 
there  are  very  few  common  names. ' ' 

It  was  of  course  impossible  that  all  of  these  publi- 
cations could  continue  to  flourish  in  the  intense 
competition  that  was  going  on.  Several  of  them  died 
with  the  year  of  their  birth.  Three  or  four  years  was 
the  utmost  life  to  which  several  others  attained.  Nor 
was  it  a  long  time  before  they  had  all  entered  upon 
the  downward  road.  A  change  had  taken  place  in  the 
public   taste.     Accordingly  they  began   to   fall   into 


ORIGIN  AND  HISTORY  OF  THE  ANNUALS     253 

positive  disrepute.  ''Wliat  a  few  years  since,"  said 
the  preface  to  the  'Forget  Me  Not'  of  1837,  ''it  was 
the  fashion  to  commend  and  extol,  it  appears  now  to 
be  the  fashion  to  sneer  at  and  decry."  Their  down- 
ward course  was  still  further  noted  in  the  volume  for 
1842  of  the  same  publication.  "Certain  it  is,"  said 
the  editor,  ' '  that  the  Annuals,  from  especial  favourites 
of  the  public,  have  come  to  be  regarded  almost  with 
indifference. ' '  To  the  observant  it  was  plainly  evident 
that  their  career  was  practically  closed.  Several  of 
them  continued  to  exist  much  later,  and  occasionally, 
a  new  one  was  projected.  But  it  had  become  manifest 
that  the  disappearance  of  all  was  merely  a  question  of 
time.  'The  Forget  Me  Not,'  the  original  publication 
of  this  class,  was  discontinued  with  the  volume  for 
1848:  its  earliest  competitor,  'Friendship's  Offering,' 
had  died  four  years  before.  They  dropped  out  one 
by  one  in  the  fourth  and  fifth  decades  of  the  century, 
though  they  continued  to  survive  till  the  sixth  decade. 
The  final  volume  of  '  The  Keepsake, '  for  instance,  was 
that  for  1857. 

During  the  heyday  of  their  popularity,  however, 
no  fear  was  entertained  of  their  ultimate  failure. 
The  main  purpose  they  served  was  that  of  supplying 
Christmas  and  New  Year's  gifts.  If  Emerson's  view 
be  correct  that  things  useful  are  not  best  fitted  for 
such  purposes,  the  Annuals  approached  as  near  his 
ideal  as  anything  that  could  have  been  devised.  As 
the  custom  of  making  presents  was  never  likely  to  die 
out,  it  did  not  occur  to  the  projectors  of  these  volumes 
that  the  desire  for  them  would  ever  disappear.    This 


254  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

object,  wliile  the  scheme  was  novel,  they  admirably 
fulfilled.  In  fact,  they  practically  supplanted  all  other 
gifts  of  books  and  to  some  extent  gifts  of  any  sort. 
Southey,  who  was  always  fertile  in  devising  reasons 
why  his  poetry  did  not  sell  save  the  obvious  one  that 
people  did  not  care  to  read  it,  naturally  recognized  in 
these  volumes  a  new  obstacle  to  the  circulation  of  his 
ovra.  works.  He  gave  it  as  an  explanation  to  his  friend 
Grosvenor  Bedford.  '*The  Annuals,"  he  wrote  to 
him  in  December,  1828,  "are  now  the  only  books 
bought  for  presents  to  young  ladies,  in  which  way 
poems  formerly  had  their  chief  vent."  The  same 
sentiments  he  repeated  the  follomng  March  in  a  letter 
to  Ticknor.  ''With  us,"  he  wrote,  "no  poetry  now 
obtains  circulation  except  what  is  in  the  Annuals; 
these  are  the  only  books  which  are  purchased  for 
presents,  and  the  chief  sale  which  poetry  used  to  have 
was  of  this  kind." 

There  is  no  question  indeed  that  for  a  while  the 
number  disposed  of  for  this  purpose  was  very  large. 
They  not  only  drove  almost  all  other  gift  books  out 
of  the  market  for  the  holidays,  but  they  also  came 
to  be  used  as  birthday  presents.  Hence  their  sale 
continued  to  some  extent  the  whole  year  round. 
Accordingly,  it  was  natural,  as  already  intimated,  that 
during  this  time  of  their  popularity  their  promoters 
should  indulge  the  highest  hopes  of  their  continued 
success  and  be  ready  to  pay  enormous  sums  in  expec- 
tation of  it.  "The  world  (bookselling  world),"  wrote 
Scott  to  Lockhart  in  February,  1828,  "seem  mad 
about  'Forget-me-nots'  and  Christmas  boxes.     Here 


ORIGIN  AND  HISTORY  OF  THE  ANNUALS     255 

has  been  Heath  the  artist  offering  me  £800  per  annum 
to  take  charge  of  such  a  concern,  which  I  declined,  of 
course.'"  In  this  same  month  Southey  wrote  that 
Heath  had  been  to  see  him  to  ask  for  a  contribution 
to  the  'Keepsake.'-  He  had  told  him,  Southey  says, 
that  fifteen  thousand  copies  had  been  sold  the  year 
before  and  that  for  the  following  year  four  thousand 
yards  of  red  watered  silk  had  been  bespoken  for 
binding.  It  is  well  to  remark  here  that  no  sooner  was 
the  volume  for  one  year  out  than  the  work  of  preparing 
for  that  of  the  following  year  began. 

No  one  who  examines  carefully  these  publications 
and  studies  their  history  can  fail  to  note  certain  points 
as  being  especially  characteristic  of  all.  Between  the 
rival  promoters  there  existed  keen  emulation  as  to  the 
number  of  authors  of  repute  they  could  secure  as 
contributors.  Naturally  their  attention  was  directed 
at  first  to  the  highest  names.  But  just  as  naturally 
these  were  few.  Furthermore,  they  were  difificult  to 
get,  and  as  time  went  on  they  came  to  be  expensive 
when  got.  Like  most  publishers  they  preferred  articles 
they  did  not  have  to  pay  for.  To  some  extent  they 
succeeded,  especially  at  the  outset.  They  searched 
accordingly  the  whole  literary  world  for  contributors. 
Scarcely  any  writer,  who  had  even  the  smallest  body 
of  adherents  or  imitators,  was  overlooked.  No  aspir- 
ant who  gave  the  slightest  promise  of  future  fame 
was  frowned  upon.  Men  prominent  in  the  political 
and    social    world    were    cordially    welcomed.      The 

lA.  Lang's  'Lockhart,'  Vol.  II,  p.  22. 

2  '  Life  and  Correspondence  of  Robert  Southey, '  1850,  Vol.  V,  p.  322. 


256  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

conductors  of  these  publications  were  in  fact  looking 
for  both  old  and  new  names  with  all  the  earnestness 
which  characterizes,  or  at  least  is  said  by  themselves 
to  characterize,  magazine  editors  of  the  present  day. 
The  consequence  was  that  any  one  who  had  the 
slightest  pretension  to  be  regarded  as  occupying  the 
pettiest  of  positions  in  the  world  of  letters  was  sure 
to  be  asked  to  become  a  contributor. 

Nobody,  in  fact,  could  escape,  however  much  he  tried. 
Youth  was  pressed  into  service  and  age  was  not 
exempt.  Even  Hannah  More,  who  was  past  fourscore 
and  had  lived  long  enough  to  survive  her  reputation, 
was  resurrected.  Writings  were  imported  from 
America,  where  as  a  matter  of  course  the  fashion 
had  been  imitated.  Here  the  engravings  were  dis- 
tinctly inferior;  and  hard  as  it  may  seem  to  have 
attained  that  result,  the  literary  matter  was  even  more 
vapid.  Many  American  authors  appear,  however,  in 
the  English  publications.  Irving,  it  was  natural, 
would  be  secured.  The  names  of  Bryant,  Whittier, 
N.  P.  Willis,  and  Willis  Gaylord  Clark  are  found  in 
volumes  of  'The  Literary  Souvenir.'  A  prose  piece 
of  Hawthorne's,  entitled  'Uttoxeter,'  appeared  in 
'The  Keepsake'  for  1857.  'The  Forget  Me  Not'  for 
1839  informs  us  in  the  preface  that  it  would  be  seen 
"that  the  fair  American  contributors  whom  we  last 
year  introduced  to  our  readers  have  again  favoured 
us  with  productions  of  their  accomplished  minds." 
These  fair  American  contributors  were  Mrs.  Sigourney 
and  Miss  Hannah  Flagg  Gould.  These  names  are 
mentioned  here  not  even  for  the  languid  interest  they 


ORIGIN  AND  HISTORY  OF  THE  ANNUALS    257 

now  excite  in  us,  but  for  the  fact  of  tlieir  appearing 
at  all.  Their  inclusion  is  merely  indicative  of  the 
efforts  put  forth  to  secure  contributors  from  every 
quarter. 

In  truth,  the  wide-embracing  maelstrom  swept  into 
its  vortex  the  greatest  and  the  poorest  authors.  The 
compositions  of  statesmen,  divines,  and  critics,  the 
unpublished  writings  of  the  dead,  the  hasty  effusions 
of  the  li^dng  never  designed  to  be  printed — all  these 
were  eagerly  searched  for  and  seized  upon.  Hardly 
a  writer  escaped  from  contributing,  no  matter  what 
his  opinion  of  the  works  themselves.  For  a  while 
Wordsworth  held  out.  He  wrote  to  a  personal  friend, 
who  was  an  editor  of  one  of  the  Annuals,  that  he  had 
laid  down  for  himself  a  general  rule  not  to  contribute 
to  these  publications.  But  later  the  price  offered 
seems  to  have  been  too  much  for  his  literary  austerity ; 
at  least  no  other  reason  for  his  change  of  view  is 
apparent.  Generally,  however,  contributions  were 
secured,  wherever  possible,  without  payment.  At 
least  no  payment  was  made  where  at  times  it  was 
manifestly  expected.  Charles  Lamb  was  one  of  the 
sufferers  of  this  sort.  No  one  had  a  greater  contempt 
than  he  for  these  ''combinations  of  show  and  empti- 
ness,"^ as  he  designated  this  class  of  publications. 
His  feelings  about  them  had  been  naturally  aggra- 
vated by  their  failure  to  pay  for  his  contributions. 
"Do  not  let  me  be  pester 'd  mth  Annuals,"  he  wrote 
to  Bernard  Barton  in  August,  1830.  ''They  are  all 
rogues  who  edit  them,  and  something  else  who  write 

1  Letter  to  Bernard  Barton,  October  11,  1828. 


258  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

in  them. ' '  He  spoke  from  experience ;  for  he  had  been 
inveigled  into  enrolling  himself  in  the  class  of  fools 
in  spite  of  his  assertion  that  the  sight  of  one  of  these 
year-books  made  him  sick.  ''I  have  stood  off  a  long 
time  from  these  Annuals,  which  are  ostentatious 
trumpery,"  he  had  written  to  Barton  in  1827;  but 
he  had  finally  been  obliged  to  succumb  at  the  urgent 
request  of  a  friend.  A  little  later  he  bore  witness  to 
their  success  in  gaining  the  highest  names.  *' Words- 
worth, I  see,"  he  wrote  in  1828,  ''has  a  good  many 
pieces  announced  in  one  of  'em.  .  .  .  W.  Scott  has  dis- 
tributed himself  like  a  bribe  haunch  among  'em.  Of 
all  the  poets,  Gary  has  had  the  good  sense  to  keep 
quite  clear  of  'em,  with  clergy-gentlemanly  right 
notions.  .  .  .  Coleridge  .  .  .  too  is  deep  among  the 
prophets,  the  year-servers, — the  mob  of  gentlemen 
Annuals.    But  they'll  cheat  him,  I  know."^ 

But  after  all,  the  body  of  writers,  be  it  great  or  small, 
is  limited.  This  fact  brings  us  to  the  consideration  of 
another  point.  It  soon  came  to  be  noticed  that  the 
same  names  appeared  year  after  year  as  contributors 
to  the  same  Annuals.  Landor,  Disraeli,  and  Bulwer, 
for  instance,  could  be  regularly  found  among  the 
authors  of  the  articles  contained  in  Heath's  'Book  of 
Beauty.'  But  even  more  noticeable  is  the  extent  to 
which  the  same  names  appear  during  the  same  year 
as  contributors  to  different  Annuals.  There  was 
naturally  a  desire  on  the  part  of  some  of  the  publishers 
to  secure  for  themselves  certain  authors  and  a  refusal 
on  the  part  of  these  to  write  for  others.    In  their  view 

1  Letter  to  Barton,  October  11,  1828. 


ORIGIN  AND  HISTORY  OF  THE  ANNUALS     259 

it  was  a  case  where  silence  was  golden.  On  account 
of  the  keenness  of  the  competition,  however,  this  was 
by  no  means  easy  to  carry  into  execution.  Further- 
more, it  was  pecuniarily  burdensome.  Accordingly 
when  it  did  happen,  it  was  due  more  to  the  indolence 
of  the  writer  than  to  the  enterprise  or  willing  expendi- 
ture of  the  publisher.  The  consequence  was  that  a 
somewhat  monotonous  list  of  names  turns  up  with 
almost  unfailing  regularity  in  these  publications. 
Campbell,  Montgomery,  William  Lisle  Bowles,  Mil- 
man,  Allan  Cunningham,  Southey,  Hogg,  Barry 
Cornwall,  Horace  Smith,  Letitia  Elizabeth  Landon, 
Mrs.  Hemans,  Miss  Mitford,  came  upon  the  scene 
everywhere.  These  are  but  a  few  taken  at  random 
from  the  number  of  those  who  might  be  mentioned. 

Less  frequently  met  with  are  other  names  in  dif- 
ferent Annuals,  but  they  are  far  from  infrequent  in 
some  one  or  two.  This  is  true  in  particular  of  writers 
like  Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  Scott,  Moore,  Rogers, 
Mackintosh,  Lockhart,  Bulwer,  Disraeli,  Landor,  Car- 
lyle,  and  Miss  Barrett,  to  mention  a  few.  But  the 
general  truth  is  that  the  greater  the  number  of  con- 
tributors he  raked  together,  the  prouder  was  the  pro- 
jector and  the  more  confident  was  his  appeal  to  the 
public.  Ackermann  prefixed  to  'The  Forget  Me  Not' 
for  1831  a  poem  entitled  'An  Incantation.'  It  was 
designed  to  celebrate  the  glories  of  what  had  been 
accomplished  in  the  realms  of  art  and  literature  in  the 
Annual  for  that  year.  It  was  in  this  way  he  signalized 
his  poetical  contributors  and  justified  the  demand  he 
made  upon  the  public  for  its  support: 


260  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

Croly  shall  our  page  inspire 

With  his  grandeur,  strength,  and  fire; 

And  Montgomery's  holy  strain 

Win  back  earth  to  heaven  again. 

Here  with  Campbell's  taste  is  blent 

Delta's  heart-felt  sentiment; 

Here  is  Landon  's  sweetness  stealing ; 

Here  is  Hemans '  depth  and  feeling ; 

Here  is  Cornwall's  manly  mind, 

.  .  .  not  to  tell  of  hosts  behind. 

The  publisher  unquestionably  felt  that  it  would  require 
peculiar  hardness  of  heart  on  the  part  of  the  purchaser 
to  resist  so  stirring  an  appeal  to  his  higher  nature. 

It  is  clear  indeed  that  one  of  the  causes  which  led 
to  the  disrepute  into  which  the  Annuals  fell  was  the 
too  frequent  recurrence  of  the  same  names.  The  usual 
contributors  soon  became  too  usual  to  suit  the  taste 
of  the  public.  Complaints  on  this  score,  if  not  then 
loudly  expressed,  were  very  plainly  implied.  But 
there  was  a  further  justification  of  this  fickleness  of 
public  opinion.  It  was  an  unfortunate  but  it  was  none 
the  less  a  distressingly  manifest  fact  that  the  majority 
of  contributors  seem  to  have  labored  to  do  their 
poorest.  In  the  case  of  some  of  them,  to  be  sure,  there 
was  no  necessity  for  any  particular  exertion  in  that 
direction.  But  poorness  of  work  was  often  charac- 
teristic of  articles  which  were  the  production  of  the 
greatest  authors.  The  array  of  names  was  splendid; 
but  to  that  adjective  the  contributions  were  not 
entitled.  This  state  of  things  began  to  be  noticed 
early. 


ORIGIN  AND  HISTORY  OF  THE  ANNUALS     261 

The  degeneration  in  the  character  of  the  poetry  in 
particular  speedily  attracted  general  attention.  It 
was  admitted  even  by  the  projectors  of  these  works, 
especially  by  those  of  them  who  had  not  always  been 
successful  in  securing  the  most  eminent  authors.  "It 
has  been  justly  observed,"  said  the  editor  of  'The 
Forget  Me  Not'  for  1830,  ''in  regard  to  the  contri- 
butions of  persons  of  the  highest  literary  repute  to 
works  of  this  class,  that  the  merit  of  such  contributions 
has  generally  been  in  an  inverse  ratio  to  the  fame  of 
the  writers."  The  poorness  of  the  contributions  in 
verse,  as  contrasted  even  with  those  in  prose,  speedily 
became  one  of  the  most  distinct  impressions  made  upon 
the  minds  of  readers.  As  early  as  1829  one  of  the 
reviewers  of  the  Annuals  drily  remarked  that  Helicon 
was  running  low  that  year.  It  must  not  indeed  be 
inferred  that  these  publications  did  not  contain  pieces 
that  were  of  permanent  value  from  the  point  of  view 
of  literature  pure  and  simple.  In  fact,  some  of  the 
best  or  at  least  the  best-known  poems  of  certain 
authors  made  in  them  their  first  appearance.  In 
'The  Gem'  for  1829  appeared,  for  instance.  Hood's 
'Dream  of  Eugene  Aram,'  and  Lord  Houghton's 
song  of  'I  wandered  by  the  Brookside'  came  out  in 
'The  Book  of  Beauty'  for  1839.  Still  the  occurrence 
of  fine  poetical  compositions  in  these  publications  is 
exceptional.  It  may  be  added  that  in  'Friendship's 
Offering'  appeared  more  than  a  score  of  Ruskin's 
poems,  though  this  fact  is  more  interesting  to  bibliog- 
raphers than  to  lovers  of  poetry. 

In  truth,  as  time  went  on,  one  of  the  most  noticeable 


262  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

features  connected  with  the  Annuals  was  the  poorness 
of  their  literary  matter.  Such  a  result  was  inevitable. 
Alaric  Watts,  in  setting  the  fashion  which  the  Annuals 
came  to  assume,  had  taken  the  step  he  did  because  he 
was  convinced  that  a  book  of  entertainment  and  a 
book  of  reference  could  not  be  joined  in  a  publication 
of  this  sort  with  much  success  as  a  business  invest- 
ment or  as  an  artistic  venture.  It  was  now  to  be 
demonstrated  that  literature  and  pictures  could  not 
be  united  in  the  same  publication  without  one  yielding 
the  precedence  to  the  other.  The  result  was  in  the  air 
from  the  beginning.  From  the  very  outset  the  work 
of  the  engraver  had  been  of  more  importance  than 
that  of  the  writer.  The  picture  was  not  so  much 
designed  to  illustrate  the  letter-press  as  the  letter- 
press was  prepared  to  illustrate  the  picture.  There 
is  one  of  Thackeray's  novels  which  gives  a  very  vivid 
view  in  many  ways  of  the  literary  decade  from  1830 
to  1840.  Its  readers  will  remember  that  the  Honorable 
Percy  Popjoy 's  contribution  describing  the  view  of  a 
lady  entering  a  church  was  a  little  too  bad  to  be 
endured  in  spite  of  its  aristocratic  origin.  Pendennis 
accordingly  supplies  its  place  by  writing  the  well- 
known  poem  entitled  'The  Church  Porch.' 

Rarely  was  it  the  case,  if  ever  so,  in  which  the  place 
was  so  well  supplied  as  in  this  imaginary  instance. 
The  articles  of  the  Percy  Popjoys  are  the  articles 
that  are  pretty  uniformly  found  in  the  Annuals.  The 
picture  might  or  might  not  be  good;  but  the  text 
written  to  illustrate  it  was  fairly  certain  to  be  poor. 
The  history  of  these  publications  shows  in  spite  of 


ORIGIN  AND  HISTORY  OF  THE  ANNUALS     263 

occasional  exceptions  a  steady  tendency  towards 
degeneration  in  the  literary  matter  they  contain. 
The  two  things  were  in  a  measure  incompatible. 
Scott  ^vith  his  practical  sense  saw  this  plainly.  When 
the  editorship  of  'The  Keepsake'  was  offered  to  him, 
he  gave  to  the  projector  a  perfectly  clear  reason  why 
nothing  could  be  gained  by  the  union  of  two  things 
which  had  little  in  common.  ''I  pointed  out  to  Mr. 
Heath,"  he  wrote,  ''that  having  already  the  supe- 
riority in  point  of  art,  I  saw  no  great  object  could  be 
obtained  by  being  at  great  expense  to  obtain  as  great 
superiority  in  literature,  because  two  candles  do  not 
give  t^^ice  as  much  light  as  one,  though  they  cost 
double  price."  The  advice  too  was  sound  for  another 
reason.  The  Muses,  as  daughters  of  the  same  parents, 
have  doubtless  a  good  deal  of  family  affection  among 
themselves;  but  after  all  they  are  women,  and  natu- 
rally and  justly  tolerate  unwillingly  a  di\dded  alle- 
giance. Each  one  is  inclined  to  be  jealous  of  the  others, 
and  is  not  apt  to  bestow  her  full  favor  upon  him  who 
wavers  in  his  devotion  between  her  and  one  of  her 
sisters.  Literature  in  particular  is  a  jealous  mistress 
of  the  mind.  The  moment  her  art  is  subordinated  to 
that  of  another,  whether  it  be  music  or  painting,  she 
is  apt  to  become  ungracious. 

In  fact,  it  may  be  doubted  if  the  commercial  spirit 
which  was  at  the  bottom  of  these  ventures  was  itself 
favorable  to  art,  even  though  it  purported  to  make  art 
the  supreme  object.  Popularity  must  be  secured  no 
matter  how  much  truth  might  be  defied.  Nothing 
therefore  must  be  done  which  would  stand  in  the  way 


264  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

of  a  large  sale.  William  Bell  Scott  tells  us  how  one 
day  he  called  upon  Kenny  Meadows  who  painted  the 
water-color  heads  for  Heath's  Annuals.  He  found 
him  contemplating  in  a  meditative  way  two  drawings 
on  his  easel  representing  Mrs.  Page  and  Anne  Page. 
''What  do  you  think  of  these  now  as  a  pair — mother 
and  daughter?"  he  asked  of  his  visitor.  Scott  of 
course  did  the  only  safe  thing  in  giving  them  praise. 
"Well,"  rejoined  Meadows,  "I  have  shown  them  to 
Heath,  and  he  insists  on  Mrs.  Page  being  as  young  as 
her  child!  I  objected,  for  many  reasons,"  continued 
the  artist,  though  to  men  generally  one  alone  would 
have  seemed  all-sufficient.  ''Oh,"  replied  Heath  to 
Meadows 's  remonstrance,  "I  don't  care  about  her 
maternity,  or  Shakespeare,  or  anything  else.  You 
must  not  make  her  more  than  twenty,  or  nobody  wiU 
buy!  If  you  won't,  I  must  get  Frank  Stone  to  do  her 
instead.  All  Frank  Stone's  beauties  are  nineteen 
exactly,  and  that's  the  age  for  me!'" 

1  William  Bell  Scott's  'Autobiographical  Notes,'  Vol.  I,  p.  114. 


CHAPTER  X 
THE  ANNUALS 

Part  Two 
Tennyson's  Contributions  to  the  Annuals 

Tennyson,  as  the  man  whom  the  little  knot  of 
Cambridge  enthusiasts  looked  upon  as  the  poet  of  the 
future,  was  not  likely  to  be  neglected  by  the  editors 
of  the  Annuals.  Accordingly  in  the  very  same  year 
which  witnessed  the  publication  of  his  earliest  inde- 
pendent book  of  verse,  three  poems  of  his  came  out 
in  'The  Gem.'  This  was  an  Annual  which  had  origi- 
nally made  its  apj^earance  towards  the  end  of  1828. 
Its  first  volume  was  under  the  editorship  of  Hood, 
though  he  retained  that  position  only  a  year.  Tenny- 
son's contributions  appeared  in  the  volume  for  1831, 
and  were  of  course  published  in  the  autumn  of  1830. 
They  were  entitled,  respectively,  *No  More,'  'Anacre- 
ontics, '  and  'A  Fragment. '  It  cannot  be  said  that  there 
is  anything  remarkable  or  particularly  promising  in 
any  one  of  the  three.  The  first  leaves  on  the  mind 
the  impression  that  the  author  is  trying  to  say  some- 
thing which  it  is  beyond  his  power  to  express.  The 
sense  of  inadequacy  is  made  perhaps  unduly  apparent 
because  both  poem  and  subject  inevitably  suggest  the 


266  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

unrhyined  song  in  'The  Princess,'  usually  entitled, 
when  separated  from  its  context,  'The  Days  that  are 
no  more ' ;  and  that  is  one  of  the  few  pieces  which  have 
reached  the  high-water  mark  of  lyrical  achievement 
in  our  tongue.  'Anacreontics'  again  is  very  ordinary. 
The  third  and  longest  contribution  is  the  best  of  all, 
but  it  cannot  be  justly  spoken  of  as  in  itself  specially 
distinctive,  still  less  distinguished.  It  is  written  how- 
ever in  blank  verse,  and  displays  fully  the  character- 
istics of  that  measure  as  it  was  to  be  exemplified  in 
the  poet's  later  work. 

Three  sonnets  of  Tennyson  also  made  their  appear- 
ance in  these  Annuals.  One  of  them,  'Check  every 
outburst,  every  ruder  sally,'  was  originally  published 
in  August,  1831,  in  the  short-lived  'Englishman's 
Magazine. '  As  that  periodical  died  two  months  after- 
ward, and  never  had  a  large  circulation,  some  of  the 
pieces  which  had  been  published  in  it  were  republished 
in  'Friendship's  OjEfering'  for  1833.  Among  them  was 
this  poem.  The  year  before  another  sonnet  had 
appeared  in  one  of  these  publications,  entitled  'The 
Yorkshire  Literary  Annual.'  This  particular  volume 
seems  to  have  been  designed  to  appeal  to  the  inhabi- 
tants of  the  North  of  England.  It  was  dedicated  to 
Lord  Morpeth,  who  contributed  an  opening  poetical 
address  celebrating  the  merits  of  Yorkshire.  The 
work,  according  to  the  editor's  introduction,  was 
intended  "to  aiford  amusement  for  the  leisure  hour, 
and  to  promote  the  hilarity  of  the  winter's  evening, 
by  a  diversity  of  subject;  and  to  dispose  it  in  such  a 
manner  as  to  form  a  combination  at  once  pleasing  to 


CONTRIBUTIONS  TO  THE  ANNUALS  267 

the  eye,  and  gratifying  to  the  taste."  The  result 
hardly  answered  to  the  lofty  language  of  the  preface, 
and  this  particular  Annual  never  appeared  again. 
Tennyson 's  contribution  began  with  the  words : 

There  are  three  things  which  fill  my  heart  with  sighs. 

It  was  apparently  an  outcome  of  his  summer  trip  to 
the  Pyrenees  in  1830.  It  purports  to  be  inspired  by 
a  maiden  whom  he  had  seen  of  late. 

In  old  Bayona  nigh  the  Southern  sea. 

It  may  be  added  that  this  Annual  contained  also  a 
sonnet  by  Edward  Tennyson,  the  brother  next  in  age 
to  the  poet.    Finally  another  sonnet  beginning 

Me  my  own  fate  to  lasting  sorrow  doometh 

appeared  in  'Friendship's  Offering'  for  1832.  None 
of  all  these  contributions  just  mentioned  were  included 
by  him  in  the  editions  of  his  poems  which  appeared 
either  in  1832  or  in  1842.  They  did  not  deserve  to  be. 
These  just-mentioned  contributions  to  the  Annuals 
made  up  everything  which  Tennyson  published  inde- 
pendently after  the  volume  of  1830,  and  before  the 
appearance  of  the  volume  of  1832.  In  them  he  had 
remained  faithful,  even  if  unconsciously,  to  the  un- 
written but  understood  rule  which  proscribed  distin- 
guished merit  to  anything  which  appeared  in  the 
columns  of  these  publications.  Yet  the  same  critical 
admiration  on  the  part  of  his  Cambridge  friends  which 
greeted  all  his  efforts,  waited  also  upon  these  produc- 


268  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

tions.  Milnes,  who  was  travelling  at  the  time  upon 
the  Continent,  wrote  to  his  father  to  send  him  'The 
Gem.'  The  request  evidently  surprised  the  parent, 
though  he  forwarded  him  the  desired  volume.  ''If 
you  had  only  looked  at  the  Gem,"  the  son  wrote  in 
reply  from  Venice  in  March,  1831,  "you  would  have 
seen  that  I  only  sent  for  it,  because  it  contained  some 
of  Tennyson's  finest  poetry."  It  would  have  been  a 
pretty  poor  outlook  for  his  permanent  reputation,  had 
this  estimate  been  true.  The  opinion  of  disinterested 
or  indifferent  readers  was  by  no  means  so  favorable. 
The  only  notice  of  his  contributions  which  appears 
in  any  prominent  critical  journal  can  hardly  be  deemed 
enthusiastic.  In  fact,  Tennyson  had  already  begun  to 
get  a  faint  foretaste  of  the  hostile  criticism  which  was 
to  teach  him  the  folly  of  expecting  to  have  reputation 
conferred  upon  him  either  by  the  agency  of  personal 
friends  or  of  professional  reviewers.  'The  Gem'  was 
noticed  in  '  The  Literary  Gazette '  for  October  16, 1830. 
It  praised  the  volume  highly  and  made  a  number  of 
extracts.  But  to  the  three  pieces  for  which  this 
Annual  for  that  year  is  now  chiefly  valued — not,  to  be 
sure,  for  their  worth,  but  for  the  fact  of  their  exist- 
ence in  it — the  following  contemptuous  comment  was 
accorded.  "To  Mr.  Tennyson's  poems,"  remarked  the 
critic,  "we  can  only  say,  in  the  words  of  Shakespeare, 
'They  are  silly,  sooth.'  "  The  punctuation  of  the 
quotation,  whether  intentional  or  not,  is  the  reviewer 's 
own. 

But  if  none   of   these   early   contributions   to   the 
Annuals  had  particular  merit,  no  such  criticism  can  be 


CONTRIBUTIONS  TO  THE  ANNUALS  269 

passed  on  the  two  poems  which  are  the  only  pieces  of 
his  which  broke  the  ten  years'  silence  that  followed 
the  publication  of  the  volume  of  1832.  For  the  sake 
of  completing  the  subject  these  are  to  be  considered 
here.  During  the  four  years  which  followed  his  second 
venture,  nothing  new  of  Tennyson's  writing  appeared 
in  any  of  the  Annuals  or  anywhere  else.  For  those 
which  had  previously  appeared  in  them  he  had  received 
no  pay.  He  doubtless  expected  none ;  but  he  probably 
had  a  preference  for  being  treated  with  common 
decency.  ''Provoked  by  the  incivility  of  editors,"  he 
wrote  in  December,  1836,  ''I  swore  an  oath  that  I 
would  never  again  have  to  do  with  their  vapid  books. ' ' 
The  oath,  however,  had  not  been  kept.  In  '  The  Keep- 
sake' for  1837 — which  came  out  early  in  November, 
1836 — appeared  one  of  the  most  exquisite  of  his  minor 
poems,  'St.  Agnes.'  This  Annual  was  then  under  the 
editorship  of  Lady  Emmeline  Stuart  Wortley,  who 
after  a  fashion  was  herself  a  poetess.  It  was  appar- 
ently through  the  agency  of  his  college  friend.  Brook- 
field,  that  Tennyson  was  induced  to  contribute.  It  is 
manifest  from  her  conduct  that  the  editress  had  as 
little  conception  as  the  average  critic  of  that  day  of 
the  treasure  she  had  secured. 

A  second  time  he  broke  his  oath.  In  the  spring  of 
1836  a  gift-book,  got  up  according  to  the  usual  form 
of  the  Annuals,  was  projected  for  the  benefit  of  a 
graduate  of  Cambridge  University,  who  was  at  that 
time  the  editor  of  the  'Encyclopaedia  Metropolitana. ' 
This  person  was  a  clergyman  of  the  name  of  Edward 


270  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

Smedley.  He  was  a  writer  of  popular  historical  works 
which  have  now  been  forgotten  and  of  poetical  pieces 
which  have  never  been  remembered.  Smedley  was,  in 
truth,  a  very  facile  writer  of  verse  and  seems  to  have 
been  taken  seriously  by  some  of  his  friends  as  a  poet. 
In  this  fourth  decade  of  the  century,  his  health  was 
breaking  down,  partly  under  the  burden  of  literary 
exertions  which  his  strength  did  not  permit  him  to 
endure.  In  fact,  shortly  after  the  project  designed 
to  aid  him  was  set  on  foot,  he  died.  The  scheme, 
however,  was  not  abandoned.  The  preparation  of  the 
volume  was  continued  with  the  intention  of  devoting 
the  proceeds  of  its  sale  to  the  support  of  his  family. 
Its  editor  was  a  lord,  the  Marquis  of  Northampton. 
A  great  eifort  was  put  forth  to  gather  as  contributors 
the  most  considerable  names  in  literature ;  and  though 
nothing  was  paid  for  the  articles,  it  was  fairly  success- 
ful in  this  particular.  Wordsworth,  Southey,  Moore, 
Landor,  Henry  Taylor,  James  Montgomery,  and  scores 
of  others  more  or  less  noted  in  letters,  were  repre- 
sented, besides  a  large  number  of  men  prominent  in 
political  life.  The  work  appeared  at  the  end  of  August, 
1837,  under  the  title  of  'The  Tribute,  a  Collection 
of  Miscellaneous  Unpublished  Poems  by  various 
Authors,  edited  by  Lord  Northampton.'  Strictly 
speaking,  the  work  cannot  be  included  among  the 
Annuals.  It  corresponds  rather  to  the  volumes  under 
the  title  of  Miscellanies  which  came  out  in  the  reign 
of  Queen  Anne  and  the  first  Georges ;  but  in  spirit  as 
well  as  in  form  it  was  like  the  publications  of  the 


CONTRIBUTIONS  TO  THE  ANNUALS  271 

gift-book  character,  which  had  so  long  been  the  rage. 
Here  accordingly  the  account  of  it  belongs. 

The  articles  for  this  volume  were  not  secured  with- 
out considerable  effort.  Among  the  most  active  of  Lord 
Northampton's  coadjutors  was  Eichard  Monckton 
Milnes.  He  sought  to  lay  under  contribution  all  his 
poetical  friends,  or  perhaps  it  would  be  more  compre- 
hensive to  say — it  is  certainly  more  exact — all  his 
friends  who  wrote  poetry.  Trench,  Alford,  Spedding, 
Aubrey  De  Vere,  Julius  Hare,  even  Whewell  were 
called  upon  by  this  indefatigable  solicitor.  In  most 
cases  he  succeeded.  Tennyson  of  course  could  not 
escape.  From  him,  however,  he  met  at  first  with  a 
gruff  refusal.  That  the  Marquis  had  been  assured  by 
Milnes  that  Tennyson  would  write  for  the  publication 
something  exceeding  the  average  length  of  contribu- 
tions to  the  Annuals,  or  that  he  would  write  for  the 
volume  at  all,  was  treated  as  an  elegant  fiction.  The 
poet  recited  his  previous  oath  and  his  failure  to  keep 
it.  "I  brake  it,"  he  went  on  to  say,  ''in  the  sweet 
face  of  Heaven  when  I  wrote  for  Lady  What's-her- 
name  Wortley.  But  then  her  sister  wrote  to  Brook- 
field  and  said  she  (Lady  W.)  was  beautiful,  so  I  could 
not  help  it.  But  whether  the  Marquis  be  beautiful  or 
not,  I  don 't  much  mind ;  if  he  be,  let  him  give  God 
thanks  and  make  no  boast.  To  write  for  people  with 
prefixes  to  their  names  is  to  milk  he-goats;  there  is 
neither  honour  nor  profit.  Up  to  this  moment  I  have 
not  even  seen  The  Keepsake:  not  that  I  care  to  see  it, 
for  the  want  of  civility  decided  me  not  to  break  mine 
oath  again  for  man  nor  woman.    And  how  should  such 


272  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

a  modest  man  as  I  see  my  small  name  in  collocation 
with  the  great  ones  of  Southey,  Wordsworth,  R.  M.  M., 
etc.,  and  not  feel  myself  a  barndoor  fowl  among 
peacocks  I ' * 

Great  was  the  wrath  of  Milnes  at  the  reception  of 
this  letter.  He  at  once  wrote  an  angry  reply  to  his 
friend — of  a  nature  indeed  which  he  certainly  would 
never  have  ventured  upon  in  later  days  when  that 
friend's  name  and  fame  filled  the  land.  What  he  said 
has  not  been  preserved.  The  epistle  went  up  Tenny- 
son's chimney,  and  its  contents  can  be  inferred  only 
from  the  reply  it  received.  From  that  it  is  evident 
that  Tennyson's  banter  had  been  spoken  of  by  Milnes 
as  ''insolent  ironj'-,"  and  that  several  personal  reflec- 
tions were  indulged  in  as  to  the  character  and  conduct 
of  his  correspondent.  The  letter  grieved  as  well  as 
surprised  the  poet.  His  reply  was  perfectly  good- 
tempered  and  in  every  way  deprecatory  of  the  wrath 
he  had  unwittingly  aroused.  Unjustifiable  in  some 
ways  as  was  much  which  Milnes  manifestly  said,  like 
many  other  unjustifiable  things,  it  was  productive  of 
good.  Tennyson  himself  not  only  agreed  to  contribute 
but  to  procure  contributions  from  his  brothers  Fred- 
erick and  Charles.  In  this  he  was  partially  successful. 
When  the  volume  appeared,  it  included  two  poems  of 
the  latter. 

Neither  of  the  poems  of  C.  T.  Tennyson,  as  his  name 
appears  in  this  volume — and  not  Charles  Tennyson 
Turner — need  now  be  regarded.  Nor  are  the  contri- 
butions of  scores  of  men  prominent  at  that  time  in 


CONTRIBUTIONS  TO  THE  ANNUALS  273 

literature  or  society  or  politics  worthy  of  attention. 
The  real  value  of  this  so-called  Annual  consists  almost 
exclusively  in  the  one  poem  with  the  simple  heading 
of  'Stanzas,'  which  Alfred  Tennyson  then  contributed. 
It  began  with  the  line  ''Oh  that  'twere  possible." 
This,  we  all  know  now,  was  the  nucleus  about  which 
was  subsequently  built  up  the  poem  of  'Maud.'  It  is 
unfortunate  that  this  piece  should  never  have  been 
reprinted  in  its  entirety  in  the  editions  of  his  works 
authorized  by  the  poet  himself.  In  the  form  by  which 
it  is  now  known  the  variations  from  the  original  are 
both  numerous  and  important.  These  extend  not  only 
to  details  of  versification  and  to  the  content  of  the 
piece  but  to  the  central  idea  underlying  it.  There  are 
differences  in  expression  as  well  as  in  conception.  The 
poem,  as  it  appears  in  'Maud,'  has  thirteen  stanzas; 
one  of  these — the  sixth — is  not  found  in  the  original. 
As  it  appeared  in  'The  Tribute,'  it  had  sixteen,  or 
really  seventeen,  for  the  last,  though  printed  as  one, 
consists  strictly  of  two.  In  the  stanzas  which  have 
been  preserved  in  the  modern  form  of  the  poem  there 
is  no  small  number  of  variations  of  language  from  that 
found  in  the  form  as  it  first  came  out.  Beside  the 
added  stanza,  there  are  verbal  changes,  all  of  which 
are  distinct  improvements.  There  are,  furthermore, 
transposition  of  lines  and  transposition  of  verses. 
Much  the  most  noticeable  difference  of  all  is  the 
omission  from  'Maud'  of  the  four  concluding  stanzas 
of  the  poem  as  it  appeared  in  '  The  Tribute. ' 

Their  omission  was  a  necessity  in  consequence  of 


274  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

the  variation  in  the  central  idea  of  the  two  pieces. 
Throughout  there  are  of  course  resemblances  in  the 
conception.     In  both  there  is  the  same  intention  to 
portray  poetically   insanity  in   the   form   of  mental 
hallucination  which,  as  suggested  in  this  piece,  was 
later  to  be  fully  developed  and  clothed  with  beauty 
and  power  in  'Maud.'    In  both  appears  in  particular 
the  ugly  shadow,  not  of  the  lost  bride  but  of  the  ghastly 
one  like  unto  her,  who  stands  by  the  lover's  bedside 
at  night,  and  haunts  him  during  the  day  in  crowded 
streets  and  the  hubbub  of  market  places.    There  it  is, 
always    stealing   upon    him    whithersoever    he    goes, 
crossing  here  and  crossing  there  through  the  noisy 
confusion  of  thronging  streets,  never  leaving  him  in 
spite  of  his  repeated  imprecations  to  avoid  his  sight. 
These  are  the  resemblances ;  but  the  differences  are 
just  as  pronounced.    In  'Maud'  the  taint  of  hereditary 
insanity  in  him  who  tells  the  tale  is  plainly  indicated 
at  the  very  outset,  and  the  tendency  is  developed  by 
circumstances  that  have  already  taken  place  or  are 
speedily  to  take  place.    His  father  has  perished  in  a 
manner  which  suggests  suicide.     By  the  hand  of  the 
hero  in  the  course  of  the  story,  falls  the  brother  of 
the  woman  he  loves  and  has  won.     From  the  very 
beginning  there  is  a  tragic  shadow  of  positive  wrong 
and  of  doubtful  death  hanging  over  the  leading  char- 
acters and  those  akin  to  them;  and  an  atmosphere  of 
blood  envelops  both  the  wooer  and  his  destined  bride 
as  events  move  on  to  their  inevitable  consummation  in 
the  grave  which  receives  the  body  of  the  one  and  in 
the  madness  towards  which  the  blot  upon  his  brain 


CONTRIBUTIONS  TO  THE  ANNUALS  275 

is  steadily  driving  the  tortured  spirit  of  the  other, 
tut  in  the  original  version  there  is  no  violence 
imputed  or  implied.  In  them  mental  hallucination  has 
been  brought  on  by  sorrow  alone  for  the  bride  who  has 
been  lost. 

The  recovery  too  is  in  both  cases  different.  In 
'Maud'  the  hero  is  brought  back  to  sanity  by  the 
elevating  influence  of  a  righteous  cause,  by  the  aspira- 
tions of  a  great  people  waking  up  to  a  war  in  defence 
of  the  right.  In  the  original,  however,  the  hope  for 
recovery  is  based  entirely  upon  the  recollections  of 
the  one  he  has  lost,  picturing  her  to  himself  sweet  and 
lovely  as  he  had  known  her  in  the  days  of  her  earthly 
life.  It  is  indeed  but  a  phantom  of  the  mind  which 
he  recalls;  but  in  this  case  it  is  a  phantom  fair  and 
good,  bringing  peace  and  rest  to  the  troubled  soul  and 
healing  to  the  wounded  heart ;  guarding  his  life  from 
ill,  displacing  the  dreary  brow  and  dismal  face  of  the 
ghastly  sister  phantom  that  had  dogged  his  footsteps 
both  in  hours  of  solitude  and  in  the  midst  of  thronging 
crowds.  It  is  to  her,  and  to  her  alone,  he  turns  for 
relief  from  this  dull  mechanic  ghost,  this  juggle  of  the 
brain,  born  not  of  the  conscious  ^vill,  but  of  the  invol- 
untary moving  of  the  blood.  Happily  for  him  this 
dreary  apparition  cannot  pass  the  limits  of  the  grave ; 
and  in  the  life  beyond  he  will  be  welcomed  by  the 
original  of  the  fair  and  kindly  spirit,  who  clad  in  light 
waits  to  embrace  him  in  the  sky.  The  poem  concludes 
with  the  following  thirty-four  lines,  omitted  in  '  Maud, ' 
which  in  the  original  follow  the  twelfth  stanza : 


276  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

But  she  tarries  in  her  place, 
And  I  paint  the  beauteous  face 
Of  the  maiden,  that  I  lost, 
In  ray  inner  eyes  again. 
Lest  my  heart  be  overborne 
By  the  thing  I  hold  in  scorn. 

By  a  dull  mechanic  ghost 
And  a  juggle  of  the  brain. 

I  can  shadow  forth  my  bride 
As  I  knew  her  fair  and  kind, 

As  I  woo  'd  her  for  my  wife ; 
She  is  lovely  by  my  side 

In  the  silence  of  my  life — 
'Tis  a  phantom  of  the  mind. 

'Tis  a  phantom  fair  and  good; 
I  can  call  it  to  my  side, 

So  to  guard  my  life  from  ill. 
Though  its  ghastly  sister  glide 

And  be  moved  around  me  still 
With  the  moving  of  the  blood, 

That  is  moved  not  of  the  will. 

Let  it  pass,  the  dreary  brow. 

Let  the  dismal  face  go  by. 
Will  it  lead  me  to  the  grave? 

Then  I  lose  it ;  it  will  fly : 
Can  it  overlast  the  nerves? 

Can  it  overlive  the  eye? 
But  the  other,  like  a  star. 
Thro'  the  channel  windeth  far, 

Till  it  fade  and  fail  and  die. 
To  its  Archetype  that  waits, 
Clad  in  light  by  golden  gates — 
Clad  in  light  the  Spirit  waits 

To  embrace  me  in  the  sky. 


CONTRIBUTIONS  TO  THE  ANNUALS  277 

This  most  exquisite  of  poetical  productions,  which 
was  reprinted  in  'The  Annual  Register'  for  1837/ 
attracted  in  a  few  cases  the  attention  of  persons 
outside  of  the  circle  of  Tennyson's  acquaintance.  But 
so  little  was  it  generally  appreciated  at  the  time,  so 
utterly  was  it  lost  to  sight  in  the  jungle  of  poetical 
weeds  by  which  it  was  surrounded,  that  all  memory 
of  it  speedily  passed  away  from  the  minds  of  men. 
Save  by  the  comparatively  small  number  who  pur- 
chased 'The  Tribute,'  it  was  hardly  known  at  all. 
Even  to  many  of  these  purchasers  it  was  manifestly 
not  known.  So  completely,  in  fact,  had  the  very 
knowledge  of  its  existence  disappeared  in  a  few  years 
that  Charles  Astor  Bristed,  then  pursuing  his  studies 
at  Cambridge  University,  secured  and  transmitted  a 
part  of  it  to  'The  Knickerbocker  Magazine'  in  New 
York.  In  that  it  had  for  its  title  'My  Early  Love.' 
Both  Cambridge  student  and  American  editor  were 
ignorant  of  its  fragmentary  character  and  of  its 
previous  appearance.  Accordingly  it  was  printed  in 
the  magazine  as  a  hitherto  unpublished  poem.  Bristed 
had  informed  the  editor  that  these  lines  "he  had  been 
permitted  to  read  in  the  manuscript  of  the  author." 
If  it  were  exactly  transcribed  and  reproduced  from 
its  original,  this  copy  besides  being  only  a  part  of  the 
poem  presents  distinct  variations  from  the  form  of 
it  which  came  out  in  'The  Tribute.'  In  that  there 
were  one  hundred  and  ten  lines;  as  it  appeared  in 
the  magazine  there  were  but  sixty-six.  Furthermore, 
there  are  distinct  discrepancies  between  the  two  forms. 

1  Vol.  LXXIX,  p.  402. 


278  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

In  the  'Knickerbocker,'  stanzas  were  run  together. 
The  punctuation  was  largely  different.  The  order  of 
the  lines  was  occasionally  changed.  Some  of  those 
found  in  '  The  Tribute '  are  omitted,  and  in  one  instance 
there  is  a  line  which  appears  in  neither  the  earlier  nor 
the  later  form.  This  condition  of  ignorance  of  its 
original  appearance  continued  mth  the  editor.  In  a 
particularly  feeble  review  of  'Maud'  which  was  pub- 
lished in  the  number  of  the  magazine  for  November, 
1855,^  he  reprinted  the  stanzas  as  found  in  that  poem, 
taking  care  to  preface  them  with  the  complacent 
remark  that  "the  very  best  thing  in  the  volume  is  the 
following  which  will  find  thousands  of  new  readers  in 
these  pages,  although  it  was  originally  contributed  to 
the  Knickerbocker  ten  years  ago." 

1  Vol.  XLVI,  p.  525. 


CHAPTEE  XI 
THE  POEMS  OF  1832 

In  the  early  part  of  the  year  1831,  Tennyson  was 
summoned  home  by  the  illness  of  his  father.  He  left 
the  university  apparently  mth  little  regret  for  the 
education  he  was  losing  but  probably  with  some 
regret  for  the  degree.  In  a  letter  to  one  of  his  friends, 
dated  February  26  of  this  same  year,  Merivale  spoke 
of  Charles  Tennyson  as  having  put  off  till  the  next 
term  his  graduation,  upon  which,  according  to  his 
own  statement,  all  his  property  depended.  *' Alfred," 
Merivale  continued,  '4s  trying  to  make  his  eyes  bad 
enough  to  require  an  aegrotat  degree."^  This  was 
pretty  surely  spoken  in  jest;  for  there  is  no  question 
that  the  condition  of  these  organs,  more  indispensable 
to  him  than  even  to  most  men,  then  disturbed  Tennyson 
very  much.  We  are  told  indeed  that  for  a  time  he 
feared  that  he  might  lose  his  sight  altogether.  Much 
later  in  life  the  motes  floating  before  his  eyes  con- 
tinued to  fill  him  \^ath  apprehension.  In  1847  he  wrote 
to  his  aunt  suffering  from  the  same  affliction  that  these 
distressed  him  a  great  deal.  ''Mine  increase  weekly," 
he  said,  "in  fact,  I  almost  look  forward  with  certainty 

1 '  Autobiography  and  Letters  of  Charles  Merivale,'  Oxford,  1898, 
p.  151. 


280  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

to  being  blind  some  of  these  days. '  '^  Still  if  Merivale  's 
remark  were  spoken  in  earnest,  it  is  enough  to  say- 
here  that  Tennyson  never  succeeded  in  making  suffi- 
cient impression  of  his  disability  upon  the  authorities 
to  induce  them  to  confer  upon  him  his  degree  except 
upon  condition  of  passing  the  prescribed  examinations. 
Accordingly  he  left  the  university  without  one. 

It  w^as  but  a  short  time  after  his  return  to  his  home 
that  his  father  died.  On  Wednesday,  March  16,  after 
about  a  month's  illness,  the  Reverend  George  Clayton 
Tennyson  passed  away  peacefully  from  what  had  been 
to  him  a  troubled  and  somewhat  bitter  life.  Fortu- 
nately for  his  family,  the  new  incumbent  had  no  desire 
to  live  at  the  rectory.  In  consequence  its  occupants 
were  permitted  to  retain  it  as  their  residence.  There 
they  continued  to  dwell  until  1837.  There  Tennyson 
had  his  regular  home,  varied  indeed  by  frequent 
temporary  absences.  Though  he  had  abandoned  his 
academic  course  of  study,  none  the  less  was  he  deter- 
mined to  devote  himself  to  a  purely  literary  career. 
To  this  resolution  he  adhered  through  good  report 
and  ill  report.  The  consciousness  of  his  destiny  was 
upon  him.  There  was  one  life  for  him  to  lead  and  but 
one.  He  recognized  fully  then  what  Wordsworth  was 
to  say  later,  that  ''poetry  is  no  pastime,  but  a  serious 
earnest  work,  demanding  unspeakable  study. ' '  Though 
possessed  in  those  early  days  of  a  small  income,  he 
was,  strictly  speaking,  a  poor  man.  ''Alfred,"  wrote 
Hallam  to  Leigh  Hunt  in  November,  1832,  "has 
resisted  all  attempts  to  force  him  into  a  profession, 

1 '  Memoir, '  Vol.  I,  p.  243. 


THE  POEMS  OF  1832  281 

preferring  poetry  and  an  honourable  poverty."  As 
it  turned  out,  the  pursuit  of  the  one  freed  him  at  last 
from  the  pressure  of  the  other.  This  however  could 
not  have  been  foreseen  or  even  anticipated  at  the 
outset.  It  was  indeed  no  easy  road  he  was  compelled 
to  travel  at  first.  As  things  turned  out,  it  was  prob- 
ably far  harder  than  he  himself  had  expected ;  but  from 
the  faith  which  led  him  to  embrace  it,  he  never  once 
swerved. 

While  at  the  university,  after  the  publication  of  the 
volume  of  1830,  he  was  still  engaged  in  the  production 
of  new  poems.  Trench  speaks  of  meeting  him  there 
and  of  hearing  him  repeat  pieces  as  yet  unpublished. 
''I  saw  him,"  he  wrote  to  a  friend,  ''for  a  few  hours 
at  Cambridge,  and  heard  recited  some  of  his  poems, 
which  were  at  least  as  remarkable  as  any  in  his  book. '  '^ 
Naturally  in  the  leisure  and  seclusion  of  country  life 
this  practice  of  composition  would  be  continued.  In 
the  early  part  of  1832,  Arthur  Hallam  visited  him  at 
Somersby.  He  had  himself  just  attained  his  majority, 
and  was  rejoicing  in  his  new  position  of  acknowledged 
lover  and  accepted  suitor  of  Emily  Tennyson.  It  was 
while  there  at  this  time  that  according  to  his  o\\ti 
account  the  now  officially  recognized  wooer  of  the 
sister  succeeded  in  persuading  the  brother  to  bring  out 
a  new  book  of  poems. 

Even  before  this  time  the  project  had  been  under 
consideration.  Limited  as  he  was  in  his  means, 
Tennyson,  like  all  other  authors,  turned  to  the  pub- 

1' Letters  and  Memorials  of  Archbishop  Trench,'  Vol.  I,  p.  91;  letter 
of  May  29,  1831. 


282  LIFE  AND  TIIVIES  OF  TENNYSON 

lishers.  Moxon  had  wished  him  to  contribute  to  the 
magazine — the  'Englishman's' — which  he  had  just 
taken  over  from  its  projectors.  Tennyson,  in  conse- 
quence, had,  as  we  have  seen,  sent  him  one  poem.  To 
Merivale,  then  in  London,  Hallam  wrote  in  his  friend's 
behalf  from  Hastings  in  August,  1831.  He  wished  him 
to  interview  Moxon  and  ascertain  what  he  would  pay 
the  poet  for  regular  contributions.  A  further  inquiry 
was  made  if  he  would  give  anything  for  the  copyright 
and  if  so  what,  provided  Tennyson  were  to  get  together 
material  enough  to  fill  a  second  volume.  The  ticklish 
state  in  which  the  magazine  soon  showed  itself  to  be 
doubtless  led  the  publisher  to  fight  shy  of  arranging 
to  secure  articles  for  it — at  least  if  he  had  to  pay  for 
them.  From  the  result,  however,  it  is  manifest  that 
Moxon  either  then  or  later  agreed  to  bring  out 
Tennyson's  new  work.  In  a  letter  to  Trench  of  March 
30,  1832,  Hallam  announced  the  probability  of  its 
appearance  that  year.  Incidentally  he  gave  also  his 
own  impression  of  the  man. 

'' Alfred,"  wrote  Hallam,  "I  was  glad  to  find  better 
than  I  had  apprehended.  I  see  no  ground  for  thinking 
that  he  has  anything  serious  to  ail  him.  His  mind  is 
what  it  always  was,  or  rather  brighter,  and  more 
vigorous.  I  regret,  with  you,  that  you  have  never  had 
the  opportunity  of  knowing  more  of  him.  His  nervous 
temperament  and  habits  of  solitude  give  an  appearance 
of  affectation  to  his  manner,  which  is  no  true  inter- 
preter of  the  man,  and  wears  off  on  further  knowledge. 
Perhaps  you  could  never  become  very  intimate,  for 
certainly  your  bents  of  mind  are  not  the  same,  and 


THE  POEMS  OF  1832  283 

at  some  points  they  intersect;  yet  I  think  you  could 
hardly  fail  to  see  much  for  love,  as  well  as  for  admira- 
tion. I  have  persuaded  him,  I  think,  to  publish 
-svithout  further  delay.  There  is  written  the  amount 
of  a  volume  rather  larger  than  the  former,  and 
certainly,  unless  the  usual  illusion  of  manuscript 
deceives  me,  more  free  from  blemishes  and  more 
masterly  in  power, '  '^ 

Accordingly  during  the  middle  of  the  year  1832  this 
new  volume  was  going  through  the  press.  In  the 
month  of  November,  Hallam  announced  its  speedy 
appearance  to  Leigh  Hunt.  In  the  communication,  he 
gave  further  his  own  opinion  as  to  its  character. 
*'I  hope  soon,"  he  wrote,  "to  have  the  pleasure  of 
presenting  you  a  second  collection  of  poems  by  my 
friend  Alfred  Tennyson,  much  superior  in  my  judg- 
ment to  the  first,  although  I  thought,  as  you  know, 
highly  of  those.  "^  The  same  opinion  was  expressed 
in  more  extravagant  terms  by  other  friends  of  the 
author.  ''Alfred  Tennyson,"  wrote  Kemble  to  Trench, 
''is  about  to  give  the  world  a  volume  of  stupendous 
poems,  the  lowest  toned  of  which  is  strung  higher  than 
the  highest  of  his  former  volumes."  The  work 
appeared  in  the  first  week  of  December,  1832.  On 
the  title-page  it  bore,  however,  the  date  of  1833.  In 
consequence  it  is  frequently  designated  as  belonging 
to  that  year.  The  collection  consisted  of  thirty  poems 
and  covered  one  hundred  and  sixty-three  pages. 

iK.  C.  Trench's  'Letters  and  Memorials,'  Vol.  I,  p.  111. 
2  J.  Nichols 's  '  Literary  Anecdotes  of  the  Nineteenth  Century, '  Vol. 
I,  p.  27;  letter  dated  November  13,  1832. 


284  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

No  one  who  compares  the  contents  of  this  second 
venture  with  those  of  the  first  can  fail  to  perceive 
how  great  had  been  the  growth  of  Tennyson  in  power 
and  felicity  of  execution  during  the  more  than  two 
years  which  had  elapsed  between  the  publication  of 
the  two  volumes.  Time,  the  severest,  but  also  the 
justest  critic  of  all,  has  settled  this  point  in  a  way 
that  cannot  be  gainsaid.  Few  of  the  pieces  that 
appeared  in  1830  are  now  much  read  or  quoted.  Many 
of  them  are  referred  to  as  indicating  the  rise  of  a  new 
and  original  poetic  genius;  some  only  of  the  number 
are  cited  as  exhibitions  of  that  genius  risen  and  fully 
developed.  The  Lilians,  the  Claribels,  the  Isabels, 
with  which  Christopher  North  declared  himself  in 
love,  rarely  inspire  feelings  of  that  nature  now,  and 
with  but  occasional  exceptions  no  very  profound 
sentiments  of  admiration.  Curiosity  is  much  more 
the  emotion  they  arouse.  The  contents  of  the  volume 
of  1832  were,  indeed,  distinctly  surpassed  by  many 
of  his  later  productions.  Nevertheless,  it  contains  a 
number  of  pieces  that  have  held  their  own  during  the 
countless  changes  of  taste  that  have  gone  on  during 
the  more  than  four  fifths  of  a  century  which  have 
elapsed  since  their  publication.  In  that  volume  are 
to  be  found,  in  particular,  '  The  Lady  of  Shalott, '  '  The 
Miller's  Daughter,'  'The  May  Queen,'  'The  Lotos- 
Eaters,'  'CEnone,'  'The  Palace  of  Art,'  and  'The 
Dream  of  Fair  Women.'  Some  of  these  poems  under- 
went more  or  less  of  alteration  in  the  edition  of  1842, 
two  or  three  of  them  somewhat  extensive  alteration. 
But  in  their  original  form  they  were  all  there.    They 


THE  POEMS  OF  1832  285 

were  worthy  then  of  the  honor  in  which  they  have 
since  been  steadily  held.  The  most  skeptical  of  men, 
in  contemplating  these  pieces  as  the  production  of  a 
man  less  than  twenty-three  years  old  at  the  time  of 
tlieir  publication,  and  in  many  instances  much  younger 
at  the  time  of  their  composition,  could  not  have 
failed  to  recognize  the  fact  that  a  great  poetic  genius 
had  arisen.  To  do  otherwise  required  unusual  lack 
of  critical  discernment  or  unusual  abundance  of 
prejudice. 

But  as  not  unfrequently  happens,  lack  of  perspi- 
cacity was  prevalent  and  abundance  of  prejudice 
blinded.  A  decided  change  had  come  over  the  opinion 
of  the  critical  w^orld.  For  the  chorus  of  praise  which 
had  welcomed  the  first  work  was  now  substituted  a 
cold  dispassionate  approval  in  the  most  favorable 
instances;  in  others  a  snarl  and  a  bark.  The  volume 
of  1832  not  only  surpassed  its  predecessor,  but  it 
contained  a  good  deal  which  the  world  has  come  to 
reckon  among  its  treasures.  But  such  was  not  the 
sentiment  of  the  time.  Scarcely  anywhere — it  would 
be  nearly  true  to  say  now^here — was  there  any  display 
of  enthusiasm  by  the  professional  reviewers.  By 
certain  of  the  most  influential  among  them  it  was 
spoken  of  depreciatingly.  By  some  it  was  not  even 
noticed  at  all.  Prevalent  too  in  the  most  favorable 
notices  was  that  calm  and  languid  approval  which  is 
more  disheartening  to  an  author  than  the  most  fero- 
cious criticism;  for  this  last  shows  that  he  has  made 
some  impression,  even  if  it  be  an  adverse  one.  But 
one  point  of  view  was  almost  universal.     There  was 


286  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

a  general  agreement  among  the  critics  that  the  second 
venture  was  inferior  to  the  first. 

In  spite  of  a  few  pieces  contained  in  it,  which  it 
would  have  been  well  never  to  have  included,  the 
superiority  of  the  second  volume  to  the  first  is  now 
so  manifest  that  it  seems  almost  incredible  that  it 
should  have  escaped  then  the  notice  of  even  the 
stupidest  of  critics.  Yet  no  one  can  make  a  study 
of  contemporary  opinion,  as  manifested  in  the  reviews 
of  the  period,  without  becoming  aware  that  its  infe- 
riority to  its  predecessor  was  generally  taken  for 
granted.  All  men  would  now  be  indignant  at  being 
accused  of  entertaining  such  a  view.  It  was  naturally 
not  held  by  the  members  of  the  immediate  circle 
surrounding  Tennyson.  Nor  was  it  held  by  those 
outside  who  had  made  themselves  really  familiar  with 
the  poet's  writings.  Yet  this  preposterous  critical 
estimate,  utterly  discreditable  to  human  taste  and 
intelligence,  speedily  became  the  prevailing  conven- 
tional criticism.  It  was  echoed  and  re-echoed  during 
the  ten  years  which  preceded  the  publication  of  the 
poems  of  1842.  It  was  repeated  not  alone  by  men 
who  lacked  sense  enough  to  know  any  better,  but  it 
occasionally  came  from  the  lips  of  some  who  were 
presumed  to  possess  judgment.  Nor  did  it  entirely 
cease  when  Tennyson  broke  at  last  his  ten  years  of 
silence  and  in  a  short  time  placed  himself  at  the  head 
of  contemporary  poets.  It  is  almost  a  natural  infer- 
ence from  some  of  the  remarks  of  Christopher  North, 
in  his  subsequent  attacks  upon  Tennyson,  that  he  held 
this  belief.     Still  if  so,  he  never  stated  it  in  direct 


THE  POEMS  OF  1832  287 

terms.  Far  different  was  it  with  the  wordy  and  windy 
Gilfillan,  who  as  late  as  1847  expressed  such  an  opinion 
in  an  article  on  Tennyson's  writings.  This  critic  had 
not  at  that  time  succeeded  in  making  up  his  mind 
whether  Tennyson  was  a  great  poet  or  not.  He 
informed  us  however  that  "his  second  production  was 
less  successful,  and  deserved  to  be  less  successful,  than 
the  first.  It  was  stuffed  with  ^xilful  impertinencies 
and  affectations."  It  is  uncertain  whether  this  utter- 
ance of  the  writer  was  due  to  his  particular  ignorance 
of  the  two  volumes  or  to  his  general  incompetence 
of  appreciation.  Possibly  both  were  united.  At  all 
events  it  is  a  proof  of  the  remarkable  vitality  fre- 
quently inherent  in  silly  criticism  that  any  one  at  that 
late  day  could  be  found  foolish  enough  to  revive  this 
then  long-exploded  nonsense. 

A  contemporary  article  there  was,  the  only  one  of 
the  early  notices  of  the  work  so  far  as  I  can  discover, 
which  not  merely  spoke  of  the  new  volume  in  the 
highest  terms,  but  in  this  particular  took  the  modern 
view.  It  proclaimed  that  a  distinct  advance  had  been 
made  in  this  second  venture  over  the  first.  Yet  even 
in  that  it  was  intimated  that,  superior  as  was  the  later 
collection,  it  was  not  so  much  superior  as  it  ought  to 
have  been,  taking  into  consideration  the  fact  that 
more  than  two  years  had  elapsed  since  the  earlier 
collection  had  been  published.  With  that  modification, 
however,  the  praise  was  cordial,  and  indeed  might  be 
called  enthusiastic.  The  article  here  referred  to  came 
out  in  'The  Monthly  Repository,'  the  organ  of  the 
Unitarian  body.     The  editor  of  the  periodical,   and 


288  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

unquestionably  the  writer  of  the  criticism,  was  the 
noted  pulpit  orator  and  social  reformer,  William 
Johnson  Fox,  whom  Browning  was  wont  to  style  his 
literary  father.  His  article  appeared  in  the  number 
for  January,  1833.  As  apparently  the  only  cordial 
and  thoroughgoing  praise  the  work  received  at  the 
time  in  any  review  of  the  slightest  pretension  what- 
ever, it  deserves  a  certain  amount  of  consideration  for 
that  very  reason.  It  deserves  this  further  because  it 
is  the  only  criticism  of  that  period  whose  general 
conclusions  have  received  the  sanction  of  later  times. 
Fox  tells  us  in  this  article  that  it  was  in  the  autumn 
of  1830  that  he  had  first  read  any  of  Tennyson's 
poetry.  He  was  then  seeking  a  temporary  rest  from 
the  stormy  political  strife  in  which  he  had  been 
engaged.  It  was  a  time  of  tumult  and  confusion. 
In  France  the  red  flower  of  revolution  had  once  more 
burst  into  triumphant  bloom.  In  England  the  spirit 
of  reform  had  come  into  conflict  mth  the  reactionary 
conservative  spirit  headed  by  the  great  English 
captain  of  the  age.  The  battle  was  still  going  on. 
From  these  feverish  and  tumultuous  scenes  the  writer 
of  the  re\dew  informs  us  that  he  had  escaped  for  a 
while  into  the  country.  With  him  he  carried  a  little 
book,  which  according  to  his  account  no  flourish  of 
newspaper  trumpets  had  announced,  and  in  whose 
train  no  newspapers  had  waved  their  banners.  What 
he  read,  however,  made  him  feel  that  a  new  poet  had 
arisen  in  the  land.  This  little  book  was  the  Tennyson 
volume  of  1830.  ''It  was,"  he  said,  ''the  poetry  of 
truth  and  nature  and  philosophy;  above  all,  it  was 


THE  POEMS  OF  1832  289 

that  of  a  young  man,  who,  if  true  to  himself  and  his 
vocation,  might  charm  the  sense  and  soul  of  humanity 
and  make  the  unhewn  blocks  in  this  our  wilderness 
of  society  move  into  temples  and  palaces."  The  rest 
of  the  article  was  in  accord  with  this  opening.  He 
praised  with  little  restraint  the  volume  which  had 
followed  the  first.  He  even  found  the  songs  to  'The 
Owl'  in  the  earlier  work  "amusing  specimens  of 
humor."  As  amusing  examples  of  this  same  humor 
in  the  latter,  he  mentioned  the  lines  to  Christopher 
North.  Vagaries  such  as  these  may  be  pardoned; 
for  in  general  the  remarks  of  the  critic  were  just  and 
discriminating.  It  may  be  worth  while  to  specify  that, 
while  commending  and  quoting  other  pieces.  Fox 
declared  that  "the  best  combined  play  of  the  author's 
powers,  reflection  and  imagination,  description  and 
melody  is  in  the  'Legend  of  the  Lady  of  Shalott.'  " 

But  this  single  distinctly  favorable  notice  came  out 
in  a  periodical  of  limited  circulation  and  necessarily 
of  comparatively  limited  influence.  Its  attitude  was 
far  from  being  that  of  the  general  critical  body. 
Lukewarm  praise  there  was  of  certain  pieces ;  positive 
condemnation  of  others.  It  is  just  to  say  that  to  some 
extent  Tennyson  was  himself  responsible  for  the 
treatment  his  work  received.  The  opening  pages  of 
his  new  volume,  to  which  the  reader's  eyes  would 
ordinarily  be  first  directed,  were  largely  taken  up  with 
sonnets.  These  belong  to  a  species  of  verse  in  which 
the  poet  never  attained  distinguished  excellence.  But, 
in  particular,  the  book  contained  towards  its  end  two 
little  pieces  which  were  to  have  a  marked  influence 


290  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

upon  the  estimation  in  which  its  author  was  for  a  long 
time  held.  One  of  these  pieces  never  reprinted  by 
him  in  later  editions  of  his  works  was  headed  '0 
Darling  Room.'  This  was  to  become  speedily  and  to 
remain  long  the  object  of  constant  derisive  attack. 
It  rejoiced  his  enemies,  it  grieved  even  his  warmest 
friends. 

One  illustration  of  the  feelings  of  the  latter  will 
suffice.  Fanny  Kemble,  then  in  America,  did  not  have 
an  opportunity  to  read  the  second  collection  of  poems 
till  the  summer  of  1833.  She  was  entirely  ignorant 
of  what  had  been  said  and  written  about  them  in 
England.  While  expressing  the  highest  admiration  of 
most  of  the  pieces  contained  in  the  new  volume,  she  did 
not  conceal  her  disapproval  of  one  or  two,  but  espe- 
cially of  the  particular  one  just  mentioned.  She  hated, 
she  tells  us,  the  little  room  with  two  white  sofas.  She 
could  easily  fancy  both  the  room  and  the  feeling. 
Still,  she  recognized  clearly  that  such  was  not  the  sort 
of  sentiment  out  of  which  good  poetry  was  constituted. 
It  "lends  itself  temptingly,"  she  observed,  'Ho  the 
making  of  good  burlesque.'"  At  the  time  of  her 
writing,  these  verses  had  already  been  not  so  much 
burlesqued  as  derided.  Such  we  shall  discover  they 
continued  to  be  many  years  after  the  poet  had  dropped 
them  from  later  editions  of  his  works. 

But  the  one  piece  which  had  the  most  damaging 
effect  upon  Tennyson's  immediate  fortunes  was  that 
addressed  to  Christopher  North.  While  the  second 
collection    was    going    through    the    press,    Wilson's 

1  Letter  of  August  17,  1833,  in  'Eecords  of  a  Girlhood.' 


THE  POEMS  OF  1832  291 

criticism  of  the  first,  already  described,  made  its 
appearance  in  'Black^vood's  Magazine.'  Though  the 
praise  was  really  more  lavish  than  the  blame,  Tenny- 
son, with  that  extraordinary  sensitiveness  to  criticism 
which  was  a  distinguishing  weakness  of  his  nature, 
resented  the  article  deeply.  What  was  supremely 
foolish,  he  resented  it  openly.  Nothing  could  have 
been  more  impolitic,  especially  for  a  young  and  little- 
known  author.  Even  at  that  early  age  Tennyson  ought 
to  have  been  aware  that  however  much  professional 
critics  may  hate  each  other,  they  are  fairly  sure  to 
band  together  in  the  defence  of  any  one  of  their 
number  attacked  from  the  outside.  Hallam,  whose 
affection  for  his  friend  had  led  him  to  speak  of  the 
'Darling  Room'  as  ''mighty  pleasant,"  felt  and 
expressed  anxiety  about  the  lines  to  Christopher 
North,  though  he  himself  had  been  attacked  more 
severely  by  that  reviewer  than  the  poet  himself  had 
been.  The  epigram  in  his  opinion  was  good.  He 
added,  however,  "I  have  scruples  whether  you  should 
publish  it.  Perhaps  he  may  like  the  lines  and  you  the 
better  for  them ;  but ' ' — and  here  he  used  a  Greek  word 
to  express  his  apprehension.^  He  would  have  been 
much  more  pronounced  in  his  dissuasion  had  he  known 
that  the  sensitiveness  to  criticism  of  the  critic  rivalled 
if  it  did  not  even  surpass  that  of  the  poet. 

Tennyson  was  not  influenced  by  the  hesitation  of  his 
friend.  He  paid  no  heed  to  the  doubt  expressed  as  to 
the  expediency  of  publishing  the  epigram.     Accord- 

1 '  Memoir, '  Vol.  I,  p.  88. 


292  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

ingly  when  the  volume  appeared  it  contained  the 
following  lines  addressed  to  Christopher  North: 

You  did  late  review  my  lays, 

Crusty  Christopher; 
You  did  mingle  blame  and  praise, 

Rusty  Christopher. 
When  I  learnt  from  whom  it  came, 
I  forgave  yon  all  the  blame, 

Musty  Christopher; 
I  could  not  forgive  the  praise. 

Fusty  Christopher. 

It  is  speaking  too  well  of  the  cheap  sarcasm  expressed 
in  these  verses  to  call  them  puerile.  Under  the  circum- 
stances they  better  deserve  the  title  of  babyish.  They 
are  hardly  worthy  of  an  angry  schoolboy.  But  the 
lines  brought  with  them  their  own  punishment,  without 
speaking  of  that  which  came  from  outside  sources. 
They  constituted  the  one  poem  which  would  be  sure 
to  arrest  the  attention  of  the  most  careless  reader. 
From  it  he  would  be  apt  to  form  his  estimate  of  the 
man. 

Tennyson  himself  came  speedily  to  be  ashamed  of 
this  foolish  outburst.  Apparently  also  after  he  had 
run  the  gauntlet  of  a  good  deal  of  hostile  criticism,  he 
feared  that  he  might  be  made  the  subject  of  a  further 
attack  from  the  then  all-powerful  reviewer.  In 
February,  1834,  was  brought  out  a  poem  entitled 
'Criticism  and  Taste,  a  Satire.'  It  was  the  work  of  a 
certain  John  Lake,  who  was  apparently  by  birth  a 
Scotchman,  certainly  by  occupation  a  tailor,  and  who 
further  was  a  writer  that  perpetrated  several  poems 


THE  POEMS  OF  1832  293 

and  plays  hardly  heard  of  at  the  time  and  now  abso- 
lutely forgotten.  He  had  met  with  a  good  deal  of  ill 
success  in  putting  his  literary  wares  upon  the  market. 
He  had  no  special  spite  against  Wilson.  Furthermore, 
according  to  his  ovra  confession,  he  knew  nothing  what- 
ever of  Tennyson,  and  had  never  read  any  of  his 
poems.  Nevertheless  he  took  it  upon  him  to  come  to 
his  defence  against  his  critic.  He  versified  a  number 
of  the  characterizations  which  Wilson  had  made  of 
particular  pieces  of  Tennyson,  especially  those  which 
had  been  stigmatized  by  a  number  of  derogatory 
epithets.  He  then  ended  with  the  words  of  encourage- 
ment given  by  the  critic  to  the  poet : 

And  yet,  "  of  us  if  he  will  take  advice, ' ' 
"Us,"  in  whose  hands  all  power  and  talent  lies, 
' '  The  day  may  come, "  "  with  our  assistance, ' '  he 
"May  grow  expanding  to  a  stately  tree;" 
But  if  he  pride  or  disobedience  "shews, 
Assuredly  he  to  oblivion  goes. ' ' 

Lake  forwarded  this  poem  to  Tennyson  with  the 
implied  if  not  openly  expressed  intimation  that  he 
ought  to  promote  the  circulation  of  the  satire  which 
had  been  written  in  his  defence.  This  was  far  from 
being  the  A^dsh  or  intention  of  the  poet.  He  seems 
indeed  to  have  feared  that  the  appearance  of  this  little 
work  would  furnish  a  pretext  for  the  infliction  of  a 
further  castigation  of  himself  in  'Blackwood's  Maga- 
zine, '  in  addition  to  that  which  he  had  already  received 
from  the  most  influential  critical  organs  of  the  day. 
At  any  rate,  he  was  led  to  write  Wilson  a  letter  in 


294  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

which  he  defended  himself  from  the  suspicion  of 
having  any  sympathy  with  the  spirit  or  matter  of 
Lake's  satire.  Further,  he  apologized  for  the  ''silly 
squib"  which  he  had  written  upon  his  re\T.ewer.  He 
remarked  also  that  he  could  wish  that  some  of  the 
poems  which  had  been  broken  on  the  critical  wheel 
in  'Blackwood's  Magazine'  were  deeper  than  ever 
plummet  sounded,  and  that  he  had  no  desire  to  see 
them  or  hear  them  again.^  There  is  perceptible  indeed 
throughout  this  whole  letter  a  dread  of  further  attack 
from  Christopher  North.  No  reply  seems  ever  to  have 
been  made  to  it.  From  later  developments  it  will  be 
found  that  it  failed  entirely  to  placate  the  angry 
reviewer. 

There  was  indeed  little  to  be  hoped  for  from  the 
general  verdict  of  critical  opinion  when  the  only  really 
favorable  notice  of  his  new  volume  came  from  a 
periodical  of  distinct  ability  indeed  but  of  limited 
circulation ;  and  when  the  only  man  who  came  forward 
earnestly  to  the  support  of  the  poet  was  a  London 
tailor  who  had  never  read  the  writings  of  the  author 
he  had  undertaken  to  champion.  On  the  other  hand, 
there  were  plenty  to  assail.  One  of  the  first  to  fall 
foul  of  him  was  '  The  Literary  Gazette. '  The  existence 
of  that  periodical  is  but  little  known  now.  Even  then 
it  was  at  the  beginning  of  its  do^vnward  career;  but 
as  has  previously  been  pointed  out,  it  still  continued 
to  be  a  power;  it  was  still  generally  reckoned  the 
leading  critical  weekly.  Its  editor,  William  Jerdan, 
had   been    concerned    during   his    career    in   various 

1' Memoir,'  Vol.  I,  pp.  95-96. 


THE  POEMS  OF  1832  295 

literan^  enterprises ;  but  the  main  business  of  his  life 
had  been  for  some  time  the  conduct  of  this  periodical. 
In  general  terms  he  may  be  characterized  as  ordi- 
narily a  good-hearted  but  invariably  fat-witted  man. 
It  shoM^s  the  benefit  of  anonymousness,  but  is  of  itself 
the  most  damaging  comment  that  can  be  made  upon 
the  business  of  reviewing,  that  such  a  literary  judge 
should  have  been  for  j^ears  at  the  head  of  the  most 
important  critical  weekly  of  the  time.  Jerdan's  lack 
of  mental  qualifications  was,  however,  more  than  made 
up  by  the  abundance  of  his  moral  ones.  In  the  manage- 
ment of  'The  Literary  Gazette'  he  was  animated  by 
the  loftiest  motives.  This  fact  we  know  for  a  certainty, 
for  he  has  told  us  so  himself.  In  the  account  he 
furnished  of  his  life  he  gave  a  fairly  affecting  por- 
trayal of  the  unremitting  and  occasionally  herculean 
efforts  he  put  forth  to  discharge  worthily  his  duties 
as  a  critic,  so  as  to  do  equal  and  exact  justice  to  all. 
He  labored  assiduously,  to  use  his  own  words,  *'to 
cherish  talent  and  to  proclaim  genius — to  commingle 
the  lesson  of  truth  with  the  incitement  to  praise — to 
foster  the  aspirations  of  the  young  and  pay  the  tribute 
due  to  older  votaries  in  the  path  of  authorship."  It 
is  not  very  surprising  that  any  one  animated  by 
motives  so  exalted  should  in  a  world  of  imperfect 
creatures  occasionally  meet  the  fate  of  all  pure-minded 
souls  in  having  his  efforts  derided. 

It  has  already  been  mentioned  that  Jerdan  had  been 
made  the  subject  of  a  violent  and  rather  coarse  attack 
by  Southey  for  the  review  he  had  written  in  1830  of 
the  volume  by  Charles  Lamb  entitled  'Album  Verses.' 


296  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

This  was  the  first  work  which  had  come  from  the  press 
of  the  young  publisher,  Moxon.  For  two  years  Jerdan 
brooded  in  silence  over  the  onslaught  made  upon  him 
by  the  poet  laureate.  Then  he  seized  the  occasion  of 
another  book  issuing  from  the  same  house  to  relieve 
his  feelings.  This  chanced  to  be  Tennyson's  second 
volume.  The  work  had  hardly  come  out  when  he 
proceeded  to  review  it,  or  rather  he  used  it  largely 
to  reply  to  the  attack  made  upon  him  by  Southey  for 
his  pre\dous  criticism  of  Lamb's  verses.  What 
possible  connection  he  could  find  between  the  writings 
of  the  two  men  beyond  the  fact  that  they  had  the  same 
publisher  he  does  not  tell  us.  What  possible  pretext 
there  could  be  for  putting  their  poetry  in  the  same 
class  was  a  puzzle  too  intricate  to  be  solved  by  the 
reader  of  to-day.  It  certainly  required  unusual  obtuse- 
ness  of  literary  perception  to  discover  the  slightest 
similarity.  Still  in  this  particular  qualification, 
Jerdan  abounded.  He  could  furthermore  plead  in 
his  justification  the  example  of  Lockhart  who  bad 
found  Keats  to  be  a  disciple  of  Leigh  Hunt. 

But  Jerdan  on  his  o^sm  behalf  was  fully  equal  to  this 
piece  of  imbecility.  For  pure  unmitigated  idiocy  there 
are  times  w^hen  criticism  surpasses  the  most  sanguine 
expectations.  This  was  one  of  them.  Jerdan 's  review 
of  Tennyson's  new  volume  took  up  seven  columns  of 
'The  Literary  Gazette.'^  Of  his  article  about  a  third 
had  not  the  remotest  connection  with  the  work  osten- 
sibly under  review.  It  was  given  up  to  a  consideration 
of  the  grievances  of  the  editor  in  connection  with  his 

1  No.  for  December  8,  1832. 


THE  POEMS  OF  1832  297 

pre\doiis  criticism  of  Lamb's  'Album  Verses,'  in  which 
he  had  questioned  the  infinite  beauty  and  excellence 
of  this  pretty  slip-slop,  as  he  now  termed  it.  For  so 
doing  he  had  aroused  against  himself,  he  declared,  the 
rage  of  all  the  members  of  the  school  to  which  that 
author  belonged.  These  had  hastened  to  pour  out  their 
impotence  upon  'The  Literary  Gazette.'  They  not 
merely  bespattered  the  paper  from  their  little  period- 
ical vehicles,  whence  they  could  open  their  tiny 
batteries,  but  they  actually  procured  Southey,  as  an 
old  friend  of  Lamb's,  to  thunder  some  verses  in  the 
'Times'  at  the  reviewer.  What  earthly  relationship 
this  preliminary  exhibition  of  wrath  had  to  the  work 
nominally  under  consideration  was  not  apparent  on 
the  surface ;  but  Jerdan  was  able  to  supply  the  missing 
link  which  formed  the  connection.  He  created  a  new 
school  of  poetry  to  w^hich  Lamb  and  Tennyson  were 
both  represented  as  belonging.  This  with  great 
severity  he  called  the  Baa-Lamb  School.  In  the 
following  urbane  way  his  notice  of  the  work  under 
review  began: 

"Mr.  Alfred  Tennyson,"  he  wrote,  "may  be  consid- 
ered a  pupil  of  a  poetical  school,  to  offer  a  fair  and 
candid  opinion  of  the  merits  and  demerits  of  any  one 
of  whom,  from  the  Dux  of  the  highest  to  the  Dunce 
of  the  lowest  form,  is  sure  to  bring  the  whole  about 
your  ears,  buzzing,  hallooing,  yelping,  abusing,  and 
pelting  with  all  the  fury  of  an  incensed  urchinry. " 
This  opening  sentence  indicated  the  general  nature 
of  the  criticism  which  followed.  Jerdan  said  that 
Tennyson  had  previously  published  a  volume  which 


298  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

he  remembered  only  to  have  seen  through  friendly 
reviews  which  hailed  him  as  the  most  gifted  bard  of 
the  time.  ''We  thought,"  he  continued,  "the  speci- 
mens did  not  support  the  judgment;  but  the  writer 
was  young  and  enthusiastic,  evidently  warm  in  the 
pursuit;  and  we  have  seen  many  worse  debutants  make 
very  distinguished  figures  in  their  riper  years.  We 
therefore  said  nothing  to  daunt  his  ardor."  This 
kindly  attitude  he  felt  that  he  could  no  longer  main- 
tain. Further  mercy  was  out  of  place.  In  the  volume 
under  review  this  stern  judge  found  something  to 
admire  and  something  to  censure.  As  is  usual  in  such 
cases  the  censure  was  out  of  all  proportion  to  the 
admiration.  It  naturally  exceeded  it  as  much  in 
intensity  as  it  did  in  length.  He  damned  mth  a  sort 
of  faint  praise  a  number  of  pieces  which  were  the  least 
worthy  of  commendation.  He  specified  as  particularly- 
deserving  of  censure  the  pedantry  characterizing  many 
pieces,  or,  as  he  expressed  it,  ''the  sad  disorders  of 
the  imagination  exhibited  in  allegories  and  classical 
paraphrases."  'The  Lady  of  Shalott'  was  in  his 
opinion  a  strange  ballad  without  a  perceptible  object. 
At  the  end  he  quoted  a  passage  from  the  beginning 
of  'CEnone,'  which  he  spoke  of  as  "the  sheer  insanity 
of  versification."  Low  diet  and  sound  advice,  he 
thought,  might  eventually  restore  the  patient.  But  in 
the  meantime  the  critic  felt  it  to  be  his  duty  to  commit 
him  to  what  his  publication  does  not  deserve  to  have — 
a  madhouse  cell.  As  the  creation  of  the  Baa-Lamb 
School  had  been  a  silly  imitation  of  Jeffrey's  Lake 
School  and  of  'Blackwood's'  Cockney  School,  so  his 


THE  POEMS  OF  1832  299 

advice  to  Tennyson  to  retire  to  an  insane  asylum  was 
a  still  sillier  imitation  of  Lockhart's  previous  advice 
to  Keats  to  go  back  to  his  gallipots. 

This  was  the  severest  criticism  of  the  volume  which 
appeared  in  any  of  the  weekly  and  monthly  periodicals 
of  the  time.  But  the  inadequacy  of  the  others  was  as 
manifest  as  the  forcible  feebleness  of  'The  Literary 
Gazette.'  Most  of  the  criticisms  which  the  work 
received  were  of  that  perfunctory  character  which  is 
sometimes  as  damaging  in  its  effects  as  the  most 
furious  attack,  and  not  unfrequently  more  so.  They 
were  all  marked  by  the  same  wearisome  repetition  of 
the  charges  of  obscurity  and  affectation  and  of  the 
reprehensible  use  of  obsolete  words.  For  years  criti- 
cism went  on  reproducing  these  particular  accusations. 
They  constituted  the  burden  of  the  regularly  recurring 
commonplaces  of  the  stock  censures  that  were  dragged 
to  the  front  during  the  whole  period  which  elapsed 
between  the  volume  of  1832  and  the  edition  of  1842. 
Even  after  the  appearance  of  the  latter  they  were  still 
made  to  do  duty  for  a  long  while  in  certain  quarters. 

The  charge  of  affectation  in  particular  had  to  some 
extent  waited  upon  the  volume  of  1830.  But  upon  its 
successor  special  stress  was  laid  for  its  exhibition  of 
this  failing  by  about  all  of  the  new  weekly  periodicals 
which  were  struggling  into  prominence.  The  parrot- 
like repetition  of  this  same  senseless  criticism  becomes 
at  last  wearying  almost  up  to  the  point  of  nausea. 
Though  the  estimate  of  the  work  given  by  these  new 
periodicals  was  in  general  more  favorable  than  that 
of  the  oldest  and  most  influential  of  their  number,  in 


300  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

no  case  could  it  be  termed  cordial.  'The  Atlas,'  for 
instance,  had  welcomed  the  volume  of  1830  "with  some 
warmth,  though  with  little  critical  discernment.  It 
had  advanced  of  course  the  authorized  remarks  about 
the  poet's  affectation  and  his  disposition  to  allow  his 
thought  to  run  riot  in  search  of  obsolete  modes  of 
utterance.  Still  it  was  gracious  enough  to  admit  that 
on  the  whole  it  was  greatly  pleased  with  Mr.  Alfred 
Tennyson.^  When,  however,  it  came  to  the  consid- 
eration of  the  poems  of  1832,  it  was  clearly  not  so  much 
pleased.  It  proclaimed  that  it  had  been  the  first  to 
introduce  the  previous  volume  to  the  public.  It  is 
proper  to  add  that  it  now  bestowed  upon  the  second 
one  a  fair  share  of  commendation.  It  gave  the  poet 
credit  for  genius.  It  quoted  in  part  or  in  whole  'The 
Miller's  Daughter,'  'Eosalind,'  and  'The  Death  of  the 
Old  Year. '  But  a  good  deal  of  its  notice  was  taken  up 
with  that  particular  sort  of  censure  which  was  to  rage 
unchecked  for  the  next  half-score  years  and  even 
longer.  Tennyson  was  declared  to  belong  to  a  school 
that  ran  a  constant  risk  of  spoiling  all  its  excellence 
by  the  varnish  of  affectation.  Fault  was  specifically 
found  with  his  taste  for  coining  words  that  had  a 
picturesque  look  upon  paper,  but  really  hurt  the  force 
of  his  meaning  by  distracting  the  attention  from  that 
to  the  garb  in  which  it  was  clothed.  A  still  greater 
fault  found  with  him  was  his  refining  his  metaphysics 
so  extravagantly  that  while  the  poet  believed  that  he 
was  working  in  the  subtle  depths  of  passion,  he  was 
really  wasting  himself  upon  air.    No  illustrations  were 

iVol.  V,  p.  411,  June  27,  1830. 


THE  POEMS  OF  1832  301 

given  of  this  fault.  To  determine  what  the  critic  meant 
must  accordingly  be  left  to  the  reader ;  for  the  reviewer 
had  so  refined  his  own  metaphysics  that  he  was  himself 
incomprehensible.^ 

Not  essentially  different  was  the  view  taken  by  'The 
Athenaeum.'  This  periodical  had  now  passed  into 
other  hands  than  those  of  the  Apostolic  band  which 
had  been  concerned  in  its  early  management.  Never- 
theless it  gave  the  volume  what  was  on  the  whole  a 
somewhat  favorable  though  far  from  enthusiastic 
notice.  It  quoted  with  high  praise  a  large  proportion 
of  'The  Miller's  Daughter,'  the  whole  of  the  'New 
Year's  Eve,'  'The  Death  of  the  Old  Year,'  and  a  part 
of  '  CEnone. '  But  it  devoted  also  a  good  deal  of  space 
to  a  denunciation  of  the  poet's  faults  or  assumed 
faults.  Necessarily  the  ever  recurring  charge  of 
affectation  was  prominent.  "He  takes,"  said  the 
critic,  "an  unaccountable  delight  to  the  verge  (nay, 
till  he  is  often  lost  to  us  within  the  precincts)  of  unin- 
telligibility. "  "Either  what  is  antiquated,"  he  con- 
tinued, "or  that  which  is  palpable  innovation  (be  it 
in  thought,  or  expression,  or  orthography,)  possesses 
an  irresistible  charm  for  him;  and  accordingly  his 
poetry  is  marred,  and  its  beauty  disfigured  and  some- 
times absolutely  concealed,  not  only  by  discarded 
phrase  and  obsolete  pronunciation,  but  by  words  newly 
compounded  after  the  German  model."  Censure  of 
some  pieces  was  accordingly  mingled  w4th  the  praise 
given  to  others.  "The  poem  of  'The  Hesperides,'  " 
the  critic  concluded  by  saying,  "we  confess,  is  beyond 

1  Vol.  VII,  p.  842,  December  16,  1832. 


302  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

us,  and  we  will  at  once  hand  it  over  to  Christopher 
North.  Neither  do  we  greatly  care  if  he  take  charge 
of  the  allegorical  poem, '  The  Palace  of  Art. '  '  '^ 

The  two  notices  just  considered  were  on  the  whole 
the  most  favorable  ones  which  the  volume  received 
from  the  weeklies.  Neither,  as  we  have  seen,  was 
characterized  by  any  display  of  enthusiasm.  Even 
less  so  were  some  of  the  others.  In  the  friendliest 
comments,  if  any  can  be  called  friendly,  the  note  of 
critical  depreciation  is  apparent.  By  several  of  the 
periodicals  the  work  was  ignored  altogether.  But  the 
most  striking  and  what  to  modern  times  will  seem  the 
most  singular  attitude  taken  towards  the  new  work 
is  its  already  mentioned  assumed  inferiority  to  its 
predecessor.  Nor  was  this  "vdew  confined  entirely  to 
literary  critics.  Hallam  wrote  to  his  friend  that 
Rogers  defended  him  publicly  as  the  most  promising 
genius  of  the  time ;  but  he  added  that  the  veteran  poet 
thought  the  first  volume  was  decidedly  superior  to  the 
second.  He  expressed  his  surprise  at  such  a  view 
coming  from  such  a  quarter.  Naturally  he  said  that 
he  could  not  comprehend  it.*  Yet  in  it  Rogers  appar- 
ently reflected  a  very  widely  entertained,  if  not  the 
generally  received  opinion.  Outside  of  the  circle  of 
his  personal  friends  there  is  scarcely  to  be  found  at 
the  immediate  time  any  real  recognition  of  the  advance 
which  had  been  made  by  the  poet.  In  fact,  the 
ordinary  critical  attitude  taken  on  this  point  may  be 
exemplified  by  the  review  in  'The  Spectator.'     This 

1  December  1,  1832. 

2  '  Memoir, '  Vol.  I,  p.  92. 


THE  POEMS  OF  1832  303 

periodical  had  given  a  good  deal  of  praise  to  the 
earlier  volume.^  Of  course  the  usual  attacks  had  been 
made  upon  his  fondness  for  old  words,  his  love  for 
old  modes  of  pronunciation,  and  furthermore  upon  the 
vicious  and  irregular  system  exhibited  in  the  arrange- 
ment of  his  rhymes.  But  when  it  came  to  review  the 
second  venture,  there  was  an  entire  alteration  in  its 
tone.  ''It  does  not  appear  to  us,"  it  said,  ''from  a 
very  attentive  perusal  of  the  volume  that  Mr.  Tenny- 
son has  either  consulted  his  fame  by  its  publication  or 
at  all  approached  the  beauties  of  his  first  publication." 
There  are  critics  whose  attentive  perusal  of  a  work 
has  a  more  disastrous  effect  upon  their  judgment  than 
a  careless  one.  This  is  a  case  in  point.  The  volume, 
it  declared,  seemed  to  be  but  an  echo  of  the  pre\T.ous 
work,  and  that  a  faint  one.  It  quoted  'Eleanore'  as 
being  the  poem  apparently  most  on  an  equality  with 
those  found  in  the  former  work.  "The  author,"  it 
concluded,  "seems  to  have  been  studying  some  new 
model.  He  has  grown  far  more  shadowy  and  obscure ; 
and  in  his  attempts  to  seize  upon  beauty  and  power 
not  of  earth,  he  has,  like  Ixion,  embraced  a  cloud. '  '^ 

Essentially  the  same  view  is  expressed  in  the  brief 
notice  of  the  work  which  appeared  in  'Tait's  Edin- 
burgh Magazine'  for  January,  1833.^  "Mr.  Tenny- 
son's new  volume,"  it  said,  "contains  many  good  and 
a  few  beautiful  poems ;  but  it  scarcely  comes  up  to  our 
high-raised  expectations  of  the  author  of  Poems 
chiefly  Lyrical.    We  must  return  to  it  more  at  leisure. ' ' 

1  August  21,  1830. 

2  December  15,  1832. 

3  Vol.  II,  p.  540. 


304  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

Naturally  the  leisure  was  never  found  to  return  to  it 
at  all.  A  change  of  attitude  had  also  come  over  'The 
New  Montlily  Magazine.'  In  the  review  of  the  first 
volume  the  likeness  of  Tennyson  to  Keats  had  been 
distinctly  pointed  out  by  one  of  the  few  who  were 
then  admirers  of  the  latter  poet.  That  fact  which  had 
recommended  it  to  the  earlier  critic  had  the  opposite 
effect  upon  the  later.  The  editorship  of  the  magazine 
had  now  passed  into  the  hands  of  Bulwer.  It  may  or 
may  not  be  that  the  review  of  the  volume  of  1832 
which  appeared  in  it  was  the  work  of  that  author; 
but  as  it  reflected  his  sentiments  there  is  every  reason 
to  believe  that  it  was.  At  all  events  Tennyson  many 
years  after  asserted  it  to  have  come  from  his  pen.^ 

Bulwer  was  an  admirer  of  the  old  school  of  poetry 
whose  sway  was  now  threatened  with  subversion.  His 
re^dew,  like  the  preceding  one  in  the  same  magazine, 
detected,  while  in  this  case  it  disapproved,  the 
presence  of  the  new  spirit  which  was  manifested  in 
the  verse  under  consideration.  He  held  that  Keats 
and  Shelley  were  abominable  models.  Their  genius 
scarcely  redeemed  their  faults.  It  was  more  than 
doubtful,  he  asserted,  if  the  former  would  ever  rank 
with  posterity  among  the  classic  names  of  the  age. 
As  a  representative  of  this  new  school,  Tennyson  fell 
accordingly  under  the  castigation  of  the  critic.  He 
was  censured  for  his  imitation  of  these  writers  whose 
originality  was  of  the  kind  to  be  avoided.  ''There  is 
a  metaphysical  poem  in  the  volume,"  he  said,  "called 
'The  Palace  of  Art'; — we  shall  only  say  of  this  edifice, 

IE.  Garnett's  'Life  of  William  Johnson  Fox,'  1910,  p,  284. 


THE  POEMS  OF  1832  305 

that  Shelley  found  all  the  materials;— 'A  Dream  of 
Fair  Women,' — a  most  conceited  title,  has  also  a 
strong  Shelleyan  savour.  Other  poems,  called  'The 
Hesperides'  and  'CEnone'  again  are  of  the  best  Cock- 
ney classic;  and  Keatesian  to  the  marrow." 

Of  course  Bulwer — or  whoever  was  the  reviewer — 
censured  Tennyson  for  affectation.  No  critic  of  that 
time  would  have  felt  that  he  could  go  to  bed  happy  if 
he  had  not  resorted  to  that  convenient  word  as  a 
method  of  disguising  the  fact  that  he  did  not  know 
what  he  was  talking  about.  He  quoted  also  the  '0 
Darling  Room'  and  the  lines  to  Christopher  North. 
''The  severity  of  the  last  poem,"  was  his  comment,  "is 
really  scalding;  an  infant  of  two  years  old  could  not 
be  more  biting."  With  all  this,  the  criticism,  though 
it  cannot  be  called  favorable,  was  not  actually  un- 
friendly. In  a  way  Bulwer  was  then  a  half-hearted 
admirer  of  Tennyson.  He  exhibited  in  this  review  an 
altogether  different  attitude  from  that  which  later, 
unfortunately  for  himself,  he  was  to  assume.  The 
hard  language  he  had  employed  about  the  author  was 
due,  he  declared  at  the  conclusion,  to  the  fact  that  he 
had  more  hopes  of  him  than  of  most  of  his  contem- 
poraries. In  their  case  he  saw  Folly  sitting  compla- 
cently in  its  fetters.  But  in  Tennyson,  who  seemed 
to  him  in  many  respects  the  incarnation  of  modern 
poetry,  it  was  genius  struggling  to  escape.  As  a  proof 
of  this  he  quoted  appro\dngly  some  of  the  pieces.^ 

More  than  enough  has  been  furnished  of  the  sort  of 
hostile  critical  comment  to  which  Tennyson's  work 

1  Vol.  XXXVII,  pp.  69-74,  January,  1833. 


306  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

was  subjected  during  this  early  period  of  his  career. 
There  was  nothing  exceptional  about  the  time  itself 
so  far  as  the  estimate  taken  of  his  writings  was  con- 
cerned. It  extended  more  or  less  to  the  day  of  his 
death.  Still  no  student  of  the  poet's  literary  life  can 
fail  to  be  struck  not  only  with  his  own  fairly  ridiculous 
sensitiveness  to  criticism,  even  to  that  which  was  but 
slightly  unfavorable,  but  to  the  fact  that  he  had  at  the 
outset  to  encounter  so  much  that  was  unfavorable  and 
often  hostile.  Tennyson,  before  he  had  reached  middle 
age,  had  won  his  way  to  the  foremost  place  among 
living  English  poets.  He  lived  a  great  many  years 
longer;  but  the  commanding  position  he  had  then 
acquired,  though  often  threatened,  was  never  lost. 
Yet  no  man  ever  owed  less  than  he  to  the  aid  of  favor- 
able criticism.  Any  complete  record  of  his  literary 
career  will  show  conclusively  that  in  the  vast  majority 
of  instances,  the  reviewing  fraternity  followed,  and 
often  followed  grumblingly,  the  popular  taste  instead 
of  preceding  and  guiding  it.  Once  and  once  only  on 
the  occasion  of  the  publication  of  his  first  volume,  his 
friends  made  an  effort  to  forestall  the  judgment  of 
the  public.  The  sole  result  achieved  was  to  retard 
his  recognition  and  not  to  advance  it.  If  it  did  not 
actually  provoke,  it  gave  increased  virulence  to  the 
critical  storm  which  burst  out  with  violence.  But 
there  was  in  this  experience  nothing  exceptional. 
When  we  come  to  consider  the  reception  given  to  most 
of  the  several  volumes  he  from  time  to  time  put  forth, 
we  find  that  on  the  appearance  of  each  the  professional 
critical  estimate  was  rarely  enthusiastic.     In  fact  it 


THE  POEMS  OF  1832  307 

was  usually  more  or  less  depreciatory,  when  not 
actually  hostile.  The  exceptions  to  this  state  of  things 
are  merely  sufficient  in  number  to  make  more  notice- 
able the  Tulet 

It  may  be  well  to  observe  at  this  point  that  when 
the  volume  of  1832  was  on  the  point  of  appearing, 
Tennyson  decided  to  suppress  a  poem  which  he  had 
destined  to  form  its  conclusion.  This  was  'The 
Lover's  Tale,'  written  in  his  nineteenth  year.  Two 
of  the  three  parts  had  been  already  printed  when 
Tennyson,  feeling,  as  he  said  later,  the  imperfection 
of  the  work,  decided  to  withdraw  it  from  publication. 
Against  the  resolution  to  exclude  it  Hallam  earnestly, 
one  might  say  violently,  protested.  ''Don't  give  up 
the  Lover's  Tale,"  he  wrote  to  Tennyson  on  the 
twentieth  of  November.  "Heath  is  mad  to  hear  of 
your  intention,  I  am  madder.  You  must  be  point- 
blank  mad.  It  will  please  vast  numbers  of  people.  It 
pleases  the  wise.  You  are  free  from  all  responsibility 
for  it's  faults  by  the  few  lines  of  preface.  Pray — 
pray — pray — change  your  mind  again.  I  have  ordered 
Moxon  to  stop  proceedings  till  I  hear  from  you  again. ' ' 
But  Tennyson  was  not  to  be  turned  from  his  purpose. 
Still  the  poem,  though  withdrawn  at  the  time,  was  not 
entirely  suppressed.  The  story  of  it  and  of  his  origi- 
nal conclusion  not  to  publish  it,  he  tells  us  himself  in 
the  preface  to  the  poem  as  published  in  1879.  "One 
of  my  friends,  however,"  he  added,  "who,  boylike, 
admired  the  boy's  work,  distributed  among  our 
common  associates  of  that  hour  some  copies  of  these 
two  parts,  without  my  knowledge,  without  the  omis- 


308  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

sions  and  amendments  which  I  had  in  contemplation, 
and  marred  by  the  many  misprints  of  the  compositor." 
It  was  the  fortune  of  one  of  these  copies  to  fall  later 
into  the  hands  of  a  not  overscrupulous  publisher.  He 
determined  to  reprint  it,  and  did  so.  This  eventually 
led  Tennyson  to  publish  the  poem  thoroughly  revised. 
With  it  in  three  parts  was  joined  its  concluding  fourth 
part  as  a  sequel.  This  was  entitled  'The  Golden 
Supper, '  and  was  the  work  of  his  later  years. 

While  the  volume  of  1832  was  going  through  the 
press,  Tennyson  made  an  excursion  up  the  Rhine 
from  Rotterdam  to  Bingen.  Early  in  the  year  he  had 
received  a  gift  of  one  hundred  pounds  from  his  aunt, 
Mrs.  Russell.  It  was  probably  with  that  or  with  some 
of  it  that  he  was  enabled  to  carry  into  effect  the 
project  of  surveying  the  now  familiar  scenery  of  that 
river,  but  which  Byron  in  the  third  canto  of  his 
'Childe  Harold'  had  for  the  first  time  brought  vividly 
to  the  attention  of  his  countrymen.  So  during  the 
summer  he  went  up  to  London  and  persuaded  Hallam 
to  accompany  him  on  this  trip.  It  was  the  year  when 
the  cholera  was  ravaging  Europe.  In  consequence 
the  two  travellers  underwent  various  experiences, 
certain  of  which  could  not  have  contributed  to  enjoy- 
ment. They  were  quarantined  for  a  week  on  the  Maas, 
moored  by  a  muddy  island  on  which  were  buried  at 
night  the  corpses  of  those  taken  from  the  cholera  ships 
on  the  river.  On  this  journey,  among  other  places 
they  visited  Cologne  and  Bonn,  climbed  the  Drachen- 
fels,  and  put  up  at  the  isle  of  Nonnenwerth  at  the  old 
Benedictine  convent  which  had  been  converted  into 


THE  POEMS  OF  1832  309 

a  hotel.  On  their  return  from  Bingen,  they  avoided 
retracing  the  journey  by  the  tame  scenery  of  the  lower 
Rhine,  but  went  back  by  way  of  Aix-la-Chapelle  and 
Brussels.  On  reaching  England  both  repaired  to 
Somersby.  From  there  Hallam  wrote  to  a  friend: 
*'We  went  up  the  Ehine  for  a  month,  and  as  we  had 
little  coin  between  us,  talked  much  of  economy;  but 
the  only  part  of  our  principles  we  reduced  to  practice 
was  the  reduction  of  such  expenses  as  letter  writing, 
etc."  Tennyson  himself  commemorated  certain 
details  of  this  expedition  in  a  poem  already  referred 
to,  which,  short  as  it  was,  he  had  ample  reason  to 
regret  writing. 


CHAPTER  XII 

LOCKHART'S  REVIEW  OF  TENNYSON'S  SECOND 

VOLUME 

We  are  told  by  one  of  the  dramatists  of  the  period 
following  the  Restoration  that  hell  has  no  fury  like  a 
woman  scorned.  However  that  may  be,  literature  has 
no  fury  like  a  professional  critic  despitefully  scouted. 
Never  has  this  fact  been  more  signally  illustrated  than 
in  the  case  of  Wilson  and  Lockhart.  No  two  men  were 
ever  more  reckless  in  their  attacks  upon  others,  more 
abusive  in  their  personalities,  more  unrestrained  in 
their  own  denunciatory  utterances.  Accordingly  it  is 
not  strange  to  find  that  no  two  men  were  more  keenly 
sensitive  to  attacks  upon  themselves.  They  exhibited 
their  resentment  not  merely  with  little  restraint  in 
expression  but  with  no  attempt  at  disguise. 

In  1818,  appeared,  for  illustration,  an  anonymous 
pamphlet  entitled  'Hypocrisy  Unveiled.'  It  was  a 
review  of  the  recently  founded  'Blackwood's  Maga- 
zine.' The  publisher  it  assailed  by  name,  as  well  as 
Murray,  his  then  London  partner  in  the  enterprise. 
Lockhart  and  Wilson  were  designated,  respectively,  by 
the  titles  given  them  in  the  so-called  Chaldee  Manu- 
script as  the  Scorpion  and  the  Leopard.  Their 
identity  was,  however,  merely  intimated;  it  was 
perhaps  not  positively  known.     The  publishers  men- 


LOCKHAKT'S  REVIEW  311 

tioned  by  name  msely  kept  silence;  but  the  two 
principal  contributors  of  the  objectionable  person- 
alities contained  in  the  magazine  were  so  enraged 
by  the  attack  made  that  they  revealed  themselves  as 
authors  of  the  offences  charged  upon  them,  by  each 
sending  a  challenge  to  the  anonymous  pamphleteer. 
Of  course  their  action  did  not  induce  him  to  come  out 
of  his  hiding-place.  Instead  he  exultingly  rejoined  in 
a  further  attack  in  which  he  published  the  challenges 
he  had  received.  ''I  really  can  recollect,"  wrote 
Murray  to  Blackwood,  ''no  parallel  to  the  palpable 
absurdity  of  your  two  friends.  If  they  had  planned 
the  most  complete  triumph  to  their  adversaries, 
nothing  could  have  been  so  successfully  effective."^ 

Wilson  further  was  specially  sensitive,  were  he 
deprived  of  the  least  modicum  of  praise  to  which  in 
his  own  opinion  he  was  entitled.  Singular  instances 
of  this  craving  for  flattering  notices  of  himself  and 
his  works  are  revealed  in  his  correspondence.  In 
1822  came  out  his  work  entitled  'Lights  and  Shadows 
of  Scottish  Life.'  This  was  given  to  the  veteran 
essayist  and  novelist,  Henry  Mackenzie,  to  review  for 
'Blackwood's  Magazine.'  The  proof  of  the  contem- 
plated article  was  manifestly  submitted  to  the  author 
of  the  book.  The  reading  of  it  filled  him  with  some- 
thing more  than  indignation.  He  wrote  from  his 
retreat  at  Kelso  a  violent  letter  to  the  publisher.  In 
it  he  vented  his  fury  both  on  the  character  of  the 
criticism  and  of  the  critic.  "I  consider  old  M.,"  he 
amiably  began,  "to  be  the  greatest  nuisance  that  ever 

1' Memoir'  of  John  Murray,  Vol.  I,  p.  488. 


312  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

infested  any  Magazine."  The  dull  vile  falsehoods, 
he  went  on  to  say,  to  which  the  old  dotard  gave  vent, 
sprang  however  not  so  much  from  mendacity  as  from 
self-conceit  and  sheer  incapacity.  **  Miserable  drivel- 
ling," *' execrable"  misstatement,  gross  and  false 
misquotation  from  the  work  **for  a  despicable  pur- 
pose"— these  are  a  few  of  the  choice  rhetorical  gems 
with  which  he  characterized  special  remarks  of  his 
critic.  The  foolish,  false,  and  disgusting  observations 
scattered  by  the  ''old  captious  body"  through  the 
article,  made  the  whole  of  it,  he  said,  actually  loath- 
some— so  loathsome  that  it ' '  gives  me  and  Mrs.  W.  the 
utmost  disgust."  After  these  unimpassioned  obser- 
vations his  concluding  remarks  are  especially  edifying. 
"It  is  not,"  he  wrote,  ''as  you  well  know,  that  I  can 
possibly  be  such  an  ass  as  to  dislike  criticism." 
Obviously  not,  the  words  just  quoted  show.  "But 
this,"  continued  he,  "is  mere  drivelling  falsehood  and 
misrepresentation — calculated  to  injure  the  book,  I 
declare,  even  in  my  own  eyes,  and  to  do  it  the  greatest 
injury  with  the  public.  It  is  the  most  sickening  dose 
of  mawkish  misrepresentation  I  ever  read."^ 

Naturally,  after  this  furious  remonstrance  from 
'Blackwood's'  indispensable  contributor,  Mackenzie's 
review  of  the  book  was  not  permitted  to  see  the  light. 
We  cannot  tell,  therefore,  what  there  was  in  it  which 
produced  this  angry  outburst.  So  far  as  inferences 
from  certain  passages  in  the  letter  as  to  its  character 
are  justifiable,  it  seems  to  have  been  far  from  a  hostile 
criticism.    At  its  possible  worst,  it  could  have  been  no 

1' William  Blackwood  and  his  Sons,'  Vol.  I,  pp.  271-272. 


LOCKHART'S  REVIEW  313 

more  than  a  review  of  the  sort  so  cherished  by  feeble 
men  of  not  daring  to  condemn  while  not  desiring  to 
praise.  But  a  highly  eulogistic  notice  was  the  kind 
of  one  which  Wilson  demanded.  The  old  essayist  who 
had  been  asked  to  review  his  book  had  doubtless  too 
much  sense  as  well  as  self-respect  to  minister  to  the 
author's  vanity  in  that  way,  and  to  pay  the  work  a 
tribute  which  he  evidently  did  not  think  it  deserved 
then  and  nobody  thinks  now.  In  the  place  of  it  accord- 
ingly appeared  a  highly  laudatory  review  of  the 
volume  in  question.  It  reads  as  if  it  might  have  come 
from  Wilson's  own  hands.  Some  of  it  probably  did. 
It  was  certainly  revised  by  him  before  being  published, 
for  it  contains  a  note  of  his  own.  In  fact,  before  its 
publication  he  intimated  to  the  publisher  the  sort  of 
criticism  which  he  desired.  ^'I  do  not  object,"  he 
wrote,  shortly  after  the  letter  just  mentioned,  *'to  a 
nice  little  eulogistic  touch  of  censure  now  and  then, 
but  I  must  always  do  these  with  my  own  hand."^  He 
exhibited  indeed  no  hesitation  in  avowing  his  attitude 
towards  criticism.  WiUing  as  he  was  to  assail  others, 
the  sanctity  of  his  own  personality  must  be  guarded. 
* '  Though  averse  to  being  cut  up  myself,  I  like  to  abuse 
my  friends,"  he  wrote  in  a  later  letter.^ 

If  Wilson  could  get  into  the  state  of  mind  here 
described  about  a  review  from  a  veteran  man  of  letters 
which,  if  in  parts  blundering,  seems  to  have  been  as 
favorable  on  the  whole  as  his  work  deserved,  we  can 
conceive  something  of  the  wrath  he  felt  at  reading  the 

1 '  William  Blackwood  and  his  Sons, '  Vol.  I,  p.  272. 
2  Ibid.,  p.  274. 


314  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

little  squib  directed  against  ''crusty,  rusty,  musty, 
fusty  Christopher"  by  a  young  man  not  known  outside 
of  a  limited  circle.  The  audacity  of  the  act  was 
rendered  the  more  distasteful  from  the  change  which 
had  taken  place  in  his  own  position.  The  half-score 
years  which  had  gone  by  since  Mackenzie  had  written 
his  article  had  materially  affected  the  estimate  in 
which  Wilson  was  held.  Then  he  was  rising  in  general 
repute ;  but  his  authority  was  not  established.  With 
the  retirement  of  Jeffrey  from  the  editorship  of  'The 
Edinburgh  Review'  he  had  come  to  be  widely  con- 
sidered as  the  reigning  critic  of  the  time.  Naturally 
he  was  as  much  astounded  by  the  presumption  of  the 
poet  in  attacking  him  as  he  was  made  indignant.  It 
was,  however,  hardly  consistent  with  his  own  position 
and  dignity  to  display  publicly  then  the  annoyance  and 
irritation  he  felt.  Least  of  all  could  he  manifest  his 
resentment  in  his  own  magazine.  That  would  be  too 
plain  an  admission  of  the  extent  to  which  he  had  been 
galled  by  the  lines  addressed  to  himself.  Fortunately 
for  him  there  could  be  brought  into  play  a  much  more 
effective  agency  than  anything  he  himself  could 
directly  provide.  At  his  command  was  his  old  friend 
and  associate,  the  editor  of  'The  Quarterly  Review.' 
Criticism  from  that  periodical  would  carry  far  more 
weight  with  the  public  than  anything  which  appeared 
in  the  northern  magazine.  To  Lockhart,  accordingly, 
was  passed  over  the  task  of  inflicting  punishment 
upon  the  insolent  stripling. 

It  would  be  utterly  unwarranted  by  any  positive 
knowledge  we  possess  to  assert  that  Wilson  directly 


LOCKHART'S  REVIEW  315 

inspired  the  attack  made  upon  Tennyson  in  the 
'Quarterly.'  Certainly  no  evidence  has  ever  been 
published  even  to  suggest  that  it  was  at  his  instigation 
that  Lockhart  wrote  his  review.  But  with  the  intimacy 
and  alliance  existing  between  the  two  men,  he  could 
not  have  failed  to  be  cognizant  of  Lockhart 's  intention, 
if  he  did  not  prompt  his  action.  The  editor  of  the 
'Quarterly'  doubtless  needed  no  solicitation  to  under- 
take the  business  of  chastening  the  assailant  of  his 
old  companion  in  arms.  But  the  attitude  of  Wilson, 
to  be  exhibited  later,  is  sufficient  to  prove  beyond 
question  that  the  review  of  Tennyson  met  with  his 
fullest  concurrence,  even  if  it  was  not  written  at  his 
request.  It  is  assuredly  safe  to  say  that  had  the  lines 
addressed  to  Christopher  North  never  appeared,  either 
there  would  have  been  no  review  of  the  poet's  work 
in  the  'Quarterly'  at  all,  or  if  there  had  been  one,  it 
would  have  been  of  a  totally  different  character. 
Accordingly  that  periodical  proceeded  to  add  still 
another  instance  to  the  series  of  critical  blunders 
which  are  strewn  up  and  down  its  early  pages.  The 
same  man  who  in  'Blackwood's'  had  told  Keats  to  go 
back  to  his  gallipots  set  out  to  carry  on  the  traditions 
of  the  'Quarterly'  by  inserting  an  attack  of  a  similar 
nature  upon  Keats 's  legitimate  successor,  Tennyson. 
It  was  in  the  number  for  April,  1833,  that  the  review 
came  out  of  the  volume  of  poems  dated  that  same 
year.  Were  there  any  real  doubt  as  to  the  authorship 
of  the  scurrilous  abuse  which  had  characterized  the 
so-called  criticism  of  Keats  in  'Blackwood's'  fifteen 
years  before,  it  would  be  removed  by  the  opening 


316  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

paragraph  of  the  article  on  Tennyson.  It  began  with 
a  reference  to  the  criticism  of  the  earlier  poet 
which  had  given  a  peculiar  temporary  notoriety  to 
the  'Quarterly'  at  the  period  of  its  appearance,  but 
has  permanently  added  to  its  discredit  in  later  times. 
That  article — the  work  of  John  Wilson  Croker — had 
been  criticism  of  a  particularly  stupid  sort.  But  while 
it  followed  the  not  unusual  method  of  the  anonymous 
reviewer,  in  being  contemptuous  as  well  as  condemna- 
tory, it  contained  nothing  of  the  gross  personal  vilifica- 
tion which  signalized  the  corresponding  article  in 
'Blackwood's  Magazine.'  For  the  attack  now  made 
upon  Tennyson  a  sort  of  provocation  might  fairly  be 
alleged  in  the  foolish  retort  he  had  made  to  the 
criticism  of  Wilson.  But  for  the  fat-wittedness  which 
led  Lockhart  to  follow  in  the  footsteps  of  Croker  by 
again  assailing  Keats  there  was  neither  sense  nor 
excuse. 

The  extent  of  the  critic's  folly  will  not  be  fully 
appreciated  unless  one  makes  himself  familiar  with 
the  situation  then  existing.  Keats  had  died,  clearly 
conscious  of  his  great  genius  but  as  clearly  under  the 
conviction  that  it  had  not  been  given  him  to  demon- 
strate it  to  the  world.  "Here  lies  one  whose  name 
was  writ  in  water ' '  were  the  deathbed  words  in  which 
he  expressed  his  belief  that  the  little  he  had  accom- 
plished, compared  with  what  he  was  sure  he  could 
have  accomplished,  would  be  insufficient  to  dissipate 
the  storm  of  detraction  which  had  gathered  about  his 
head.  For  a  long  while  it  seemed  as  if  his  prophecy 
would  be  realized.    Not  an  edition  of  any  one  of  his 


LOCKHART'S  REVIEW  317 

poems  appeared  in  England  after  the  volume  of  1820 — 
the  last  published  during  his  lifetime — till  his  works 
were  brought  out  collectively  in  1840  in  a  cheap  form 
in  William  Smith 's  Standard  Library.  Few,  too,  were 
the  references  made  to  him  in  critical  literature  during 
the  score  of  years  that  passed  between  those  two 
publications.  So  unfamiliar  indeed  to  professional 
critics  was  even  his  name  that  it  was  frequently  spelled 
Keates. 

It  was  the  little  knowledge  then  possessed  of  that 
poet  outside  of  a  limited  circle,  it  was  the  consequent 
little  demand  for  his  works,  which  furnished  Lockhart 
with  a  pretext  for  making  a  mock  apology  for  Croker  's 
previous  review.  With  what  seems  now  indescribable 
thick-headedness  but  which  most  of  his  readers  doubt- 
less then  regarded  as  Avit,  he  affected  to  believe  that 
Keats  had  become  a  special  favorite  of  the  public,  and 
that  his  poetry  was  circulated  and  read  everywhere. 
He  indulged  in  an  ironical  lament  over  the  inability 
which  had  been  displayed  by  the  'Quarterly'  to  foresee 
the  unbounded  popularity  which  that  poet  had  unex- 
pectedly gained.  He  therefore,  to  use  his  own  lan- 
guage, took  occasion  to  sing  a  palinode  on  the  subject 
of  'Endymion,'  "We  certainly  did  not  discover,"  he 
wrote,  "in  that  poem  the  same  degree  of  merit  that  its 
more  clear-sighted  and  prophetic  admirers  did.  We 
did  not  foresee  the  unbounded  popularity  which  has 
carried  it  through  we  know  not  how  many  editions; 
which  has  placed  it  on  every  table;  and,  what  is  still 
more  unequivocal,  familiarized  it  in  every  mouth.  All 
this  splendour  of  fame,  however,  though  we  had  not 


318  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

the  sagacity  to  anticipate,  we  have  the  candour  to 
acknowledge;  and  we  request  that  the  publisher  of 
the  new  and  beautiful  edition  of  Keats 's  works  now 
in  the  press,  with  graphic  illustrations  by  Calcott  and 
Turner,  will  do  us  the  favour  and  the  justice  to  notice 
our  conversion  in  his  prolegomena."  The  malicious 
irony  of  this  reference  to  the  dead  poet  was  undoubt- 
edly entertaining  to  many  men  at  that  time.  As  we 
have  seen,  it  had  for  its  basis  the  fact  that  no  complete 
edition  of  the  works  of  Keats  had  as  yet  appeared  in 
England;  that  indeed  no  such  edition  was  procurable 
anywhere  save  as  part  of  a  volume  published  in  Paris ; 
and  that  while  his  fame  was  slowly  making  its  way, 
it  was  making  it  very  slowly;  that  consequently  his 
poems  were  no  more  upon  every  one's  table  than  were 
his  words  in  every  one's  mouth;  and  that  of  course 
no  such  illustrated  edition  of  his  works  as  is  here 
dwelt  upon,  had  ever  been  contemplated,  far  less  under- 
taken, by  anybody.  Lockhart  clearly  fancied  that 
nothing  of  the  sort  would  ever  exist  because  it  did  not 
exist  then. 

It  is  not  often  given  to  the  same  man  to  distinguish 
himself  by  two  such  examples  of  crass  incompetence 
of  appreciation  of  a  poet,  whose  greatness  he  could 
not  comprehend,  as  in  the  article  on  Keats  in  'Black- 
wood's Magazine'  and  by  the  further  reference  to  him 
in  the  beginning  of  the  article  on  Tennyson.  For 
Lockhart,  though  far  from  being  a  man  of  genius,  was 
a  man  of  great  ability.  In  many  ways  too  he  was  of 
fine  poetic  taste  and  literary  acumen.  This  makes  it 
harder  to  comprehend  how  totally  unconscious  he  was 


LOCKHART'S  REVIEW  319 

of  the  genius  of  the  writer  he  was  assailing  and  how 
utterly  unsuspicious  of  the  agencies  which  were  then 
at  work  to  place  Keats  at  no  distant  period  among  the 
very  greatest  of  his  contemporaries.  But  his  previous 
achievements  in  criticism  of  the  dead  poet  were  now 
to  be  rivalled  by  his  criticism  of  the  living  one.  Credit 
indeed  must  be  given  to  him  for  his  sagacity  in  detect- 
ing the  relationship  of  Tennyson  to  Keats  in  spite  of 
his  indisposition  or  perhaps  of  his  incapacity  to 
recognize  the  greatness  of  either.  On  the  later  poet 
he  began  his  review  in  the  same  strain  of  ironical 
praise  which  he  had  bestowed  upon  the  earlier.  "This 
is,"  he  said,  **as  some  of  his  marginal  notes  intimate, 
Mr.  Tennyson's  second  appearance.  By  some  strange 
chance  we  have  never  seen  his  first  publication,  which, 
if  it  at  all  resembles  its  younger  brother,  must  be  by 
this  time  so  popular  that  any  notice  of  it  on  our  part 
would  seem  idle  and  presumptuous;  but  we  gladly 
seize  this  opportunity  of  repairing  an  unintentional 
neglect,  and  of  introducing  to  the  admiration  of  our 
more  sequestered  readers  a  new  prodigy  of  genius — 
another  and  a  brighter  star  of  that  galaxy  or  milky 
ivay  of  poetry  of  which  the  lamented  Keats  was  the 
harbinger."  Then  followed  the  comments  upon  the 
latter  poet  which  have  just  been  quoted. 

It  was  in  the  same  strain  of  mock  laudation  with 
which  Keats  had  been  spoken  of  that  Lockhart  pro- 
ceeded to  notice  the  work  under  review  and  its  author. 
Warned,  he  said,  by  his  former  mishap,  wiser  by 
experience,  and  improved  as  he  hoped  in  taste,  he  now 
set  out  to  offer  Mr.  Tennyson  a  tribute  of  unmingled 


320  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

approbation.  His  present  task  would  be  therefore  to 
bring  together  for  the  delight  of  his  readers  a  few 
specimens  of  the  poet's  singular  genius  and  to  point 
out,  now  and  then,  some  of  the  gems  that  irradiate  his 
poetical  crown.  This  was  done  by  selecting  a  number 
of  passages  from  the  poems  and  dwelling  upon  them 
in  a  strain  of  pretended  admiration.  This  would  have 
been  legitimate  enough  had  not  the  verses  been 
mangled  and  their  meaning  perverted  in  order  to  give 
point  to  the  attack.  So  long  as  the  purely  ironical 
tone  was  maintained,  the  review,  however  unfair  in  its 
criticism  and,  in  the  light  of  subsequent  events,  how- 
ever damaging  to  its  author,  is  entertaining  for  its 
malice.  But  the  moment  the  poet  is  assailed  directly, 
the  observations  often  degenerate  into  what  is  nothing 
more  than  a  cheap  abusiveness.  There  was  not  the 
slightest  effort  made  to  give  any  real  conception  of  the 
nature  of  the  work  under  examination.  In  fact  the 
effort  was  made  to  prevent  any  such  conception  being 
gained.  All  the  tricks  to  which  disreputable  criticism 
resorts  were  employed.  The  least  valuable  pieces 
were  largely  selected  for  extended  comment.  Lines 
and  passages  were  wrenched  from  the  context  explain- 
ing and  modifying  them,  so  as  to  give  a  pretext  for 
the  employment  of  what  may  be  designated  as  a  sort 
of  horse-raillery.  In  truth,  the  review,  taken  as  a 
whole,  is  a  peculiarly  bad  specimen  of  a  bad  class ;  for 
while  some  of  it  is  witty,  it  is  dishonest  throughout 
and  at  times  little  more  than  vulgarly  vituperative. 

The  article  concluded  with  quoting  in  full  the  lines 
to  Christopher  North  and  commenting  upon  them  and 


LOCKHART'S  REVIEW  321 

the  attitude  towards  criticism  displayed  by  the  poet. 
It  was  for  the  sake  of  this  one  piece  that  the  review 
had  been  really  written.  If  anything  were  needed  to 
render  it  morally  certain  that,  in  this  criticism  of 
Tennyson's  second  volume,  Lockhart  was  acting  as 
the  mouthpiece  of  Wilson,  it  would  be  the  dispropor- 
tionate attention  which  was  given  to  this  little  poem 
of  nine  lines  taken  out  of  a  volume  of  one  hundred  and 
sixty-three  pages.  To  it  alone  w^ere  devoted  two  of 
the  fifteen  pages  which  made  up  the  whole  of  the 
review.  It  was,  he  said,  one  of  ' '  two  pieces  of  lighter 
strain  which  the  volume  affords."  Accordingly  he 
purposed  to  delight  his  readers  with  the  "severe 
retaliation  on  the  editor  of  the  Edinburgh  magazine 
which,  it  seems,  had  not  treated  the  first  volume  of 
Mr.  Tennyson  with  the  same  respect  that  we  have,  we 
trust,  evinced  for  the  second. ' '  Had  the  review  of  the 
whole  work  been  as  honest  as  it  was  dishonest,  this 
would  have  been  a  thoroughly  justifiable  retort.  As  it 
is,  this  article  in  its  entirety  deserves,  as  FitzGerald 
said  of  Croker's  previous  article  on  Keats,  to  be  bound 
up  with  every  edition  of  the  poet  as  a  standing  warning 
to  critics. 

But  before  entering  upon  the  consideration  of  these 
lines  to  Christopher  North,  Lockhart  seized  with 
eagerness  upon  another  little  poem  in  the  collection 
in  which  Tennyson  had  laid  himself  peculiarly  open 
to  attack.  This  was  the  one  entitled  '  0  Darling  Room. ' 
Special  attention  was  called  to  it  by  printing  the  whole 
of  it  with  a  running  comment  on  its  text.  The  reviewer 
had  in  this  piece  the  best  justification  for  the  malice 


322  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

he  displayed.  As  this  poem  is  no  longer  found  in  any- 
authorized  edition  of  the  poet's  works,  it  is  given  here 
precisely  as  printed  in  the  'Quarterly,'  where  certain 
words  and  syllables  were  intentionally  italicized.  The 
poem,  began  Lockhart,  ''is  elegant  and  playful;  it  is 
a  description  of  the  author's  study,  which  he  affec- 
tionately calls  his  Darling  Room."  Then  follow  the 
lines  as  they  appear  in  the  review: 

O  darling  room,  ray  heart's  delight; 
Dear  room,  the  apple  of  my  sight ; 
With  thy  two  couches,  soft  and  white, 
There  is  no  room  so  exquisiYe; 
No  little  room  so  warm  and  bright. 
Wherein  to  read,  wherein  to  write. 

For  I  the  Nonnenwerth  have  seen, 
And  Oberwinter's  vineyards  green, 
Musical  Lurlei;  and  between 
The  hills  to  Bingen  I  have  been, 
Bingen  in  Darmstadt,  where  the  Rhene 
Curves  towards  Mentz — a  woody  scene. 

Yet  never  did  there  meet  my  sight. 

In  any  town  to  left  or  right, 

A  little  room  so  exquisite, 

With  two  such  couches  soft  and  white; 

Not  any  room  so  warm  and  bright. 

Wherein  to  read,  wherein  to  write. 

This  distinctly  dreadful  poem  has  probably  never  had 
a  friend  to  say  anything  in  its  favor.  By  it  Tennyson 
gave  a  sort  of  pretext  for  the  title  of  "School-Miss 
Alfred, ' '  which  Bulwer  in  an  anonymous  work  applied 
to  him  later;  though  as  we  shall  see,  he  came  out  of 


LOCKHART'S  REVIEW  323 

the  conflict  which  ensued  with  the  feeling  that  he  had 
been  in  the  gripe  of  an  opponent  who  bore  a  closer 
resemblance  to  a  grizzly  bear  than  to  a  schoolgirl. 
Assuredly,  however,  the  treasure-house  of  namby- 
pambyism  never  had  a  better  representative  specimen 
of  its  contents  than  this  poem.  It  is  so  bad  of  its  kind 
that  it  fairly  deserves  the  title  of  good. 

To  seize  upon  these  two  little  pieces  as  fairly  repre- 
sentative of  the  volume  was  however  worse  than  a 
crime  in  criticism;  it  was  a  stupendous  literary 
blunder.  Had  Tennyson  been  the  poetaster  Lockhart 
tried  to  give  the  impression  of  his  being,  there  might 
have  been  a  pretence  that  he  deserved  the  sarcasm 
which  was  lavished  upon  his  productions,  unfair  as  it 
would  have  been  even  then  under  the  conditions  given. 
Unfortunately  for  the  reviewer,  Tennyson  was  very 
far  from  being  a  poetaster.  Never  was  he  so  regarded 
then  or  later.  Never  could  he  have  been  termed  so, 
save  by  envious  men  who  had  approved  themselves 
fully  entitled  to  the  appellation.  Accordingly,  as 
things  turned  out,  it  was  more  than  inappropriateness 
that  characterized  his  article.  It  was  inept  beyond  the 
justifiable  limits  of  captious  blundering.  Few  profes- 
sional reviewers  there  are  who  do  not  perpetrate  at 
times  literary  criticisms  of  which  later  they  come  to 
be  ashamed  themselves;  or  if  they  have  not  enough 
sense  for  that,  they  come  to  learn  that  their  perform- 
ances have  brought  mortification  to  their  friends  and 
hardly  concealed  glee  to  their  enemies.  But  it  is 
doubtful  if  in  the  annals  of  literary  history  two  grosser 
examples  of  critical  blundering  can  be  found  than  in 


324  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

Lockhart's  article  on  Keats  in  'Blackwood's  Magazine' 
for  1817  and  in  the  article  on  Tennyson  in  'The 
Quarterly  Review'  for  1833.  It  is  a  hea^der  burden 
to  carry  down  to  posterity  than  even  a  far  greater 
man  than  he  could  well  bear.  Lockhart  lived  long 
enough  to  regret  for  his  own  sake  the  composition  of 
these  two  effusions.  He  lived  long  enough  to  see  the 
two  men  whom  he  had  attacked  lifted  in  public  esti- 
mation to  a  pinnacle  to  which  it  was  hopeless  for  him 
even  to  venture  to  aspire. 

For  the  moment,  however,  the  triumph  remained 
with  him.  Though  the  influence  of  the  great  quarter- 
lies was  then  beginning  to  decline,  it  was  still  potent, 
more  potent  than  that  of  the  other  agencies  which  were 
coming  to  displace  it.  By  it  were  still  affected  the 
opinions  of  a  great  body  of  cultivated  men.  Its  dicta 
were  accepted  as  gospel  by  thousands  of  readers  who 
honestly  supposed  they  had  minds  of  their  own. 
There  is  little  danger  of  our  underrating  the  effect 
Lockhart's  article  had  in  confirming  and  intensifying 
the  tone  of  depreciatory  criticism  which  had  begun  to 
show  itself  in  many  of  the  minor  periodicals  of  the 
time.  To  this  effect  Tennyson's  own  action  contrib- 
uted. The  general  character  of  the  criticism  to  which 
he  was  subjected  as  well  as  his  own  behavior  under 
it  naturally  come  up  now  for  consideration. 


CHAPTER  XIII 

THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— FIRST  HALF 

1832-1837 

From  no  quarter  of  much  influence  was  warm  praise 
accorded  to  Tennyson's  second  venture.  On  the  con- 
trary, it  had  met  with  almost  universal  disparage- 
ment, none  the  less  potent  in  its  effect  upon  the  public 
because  of  its  incompetence ;  for  it  appeared  in  an  age 
when  the  practice  of  reading  reviews  of  books  instead 
of  the  books  themselves  had  at  last  fully  established 
itself.  The  volume  of  poems  had,  as  we  have  seen, 
been  made  the  object  of  hostile  and  occasionally 
virulent  attack  from  numerous  quarters,  and  particu- 
larly from  the  most  influential  critical  weekly  of  the 
time.  But  far  more  damaging  than  all  these  combined 
was  Lockhart  's  review.  He  who  has  not  made  himself 
familiar  with  the  power  which  the  two  great  quarterlies 
still  continued  to  wield  can  little  comprehend  the  effect 
wrought  by  this  article  upon  the  estimation  in  which 
Tennyson  soon  came  to  be  held.  It  lasted  all  through 
the  fourth  decade  of  the  century.  It  extended  into  the 
decade  following.  It  did  not  even  die  out  entirely  after 
Tennyson's  reputation  had  begun  to  carry  everything 
before  it.  Echoes  of  it  continued  to  appear  until  the 
poet  was  so  effectually  established  in  the  regard  of 
his  countrymen  that  it  was  no  longer  felt  safe  even 


326  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

by  the  envious,  the  malignant,  and  the  intellectually 
feeble  to  avow  publicly  their  hostility. 

At  the  time  itself,  however,  there  was  no  restraining 
influence  of  this  sort.  Lockhart's  article  set  the 
fashion  which  largely  prevailed  during  the  years 
immediately  succeeding  its  appearance,  either  of 
depreciating  the  poet  or  of  treating  him  as  altogether 
unworthy  of  consideration.  There  have  been  occa- 
sional efforts  put  forth  in  these  latter  days  to  designate 
this  review  as  a  sportive  exhibition  of  what  is  termed 
chaff,  somewhat  malicious  to  be  sure,  but  on  the  whole 
laughable.  Clearly  no  such  impression  was  intended 
by  the  writer;  no  such  impression  certainly  was  then 
made  on  the  reader.  It  did  not  seem  such  to  Tenny- 
son's indignant  friends  and  admirers.  Nor  even  did 
it  seem  such  to  indifferent  onlookers.  They  too  felt 
its  gross  injustice.  The  fact  that  a  particular  work 
did  not  sell  largely  did  not  impress  them  as  a  decisive 
factor  in  settling  its  merits.  ^ '  The  article  on  Tennyson 
in  the  Quarterly,"  said  'The  Athenaeum,'  ''is  strangely 
provocative  of  comment.  No  sane  man  imagines  that 
Tennyson  is  the  Homer  which  the  Westminster 
affected  to  believe ;  but  he  has  much  fine  poetry  about 
him;  and  if  we  are  to  give  the  name  of  poets  only 
to  those  whose  works  are  illustrated  by  Turner  and 
Calcott,  then  Wordsworth  is  no  poet,  neither  is 
Wilson."^ 

Others  again  regarded  Lockhart's  attack  unfavor- 
ably in  contrast  with  the  criticism  in  'Blackwood' 
which  Tennyson  had  foolishly  resented.     This  feeling 

I'Athenseum'  for  April  13,  1833,  p.  234. 


THE  TEN  YEAKS'  SILENCE— FIRST  HALF     327 

comes  out  distinctly  in  an  article  on  reviewing  which 
appeared  in  the  first  number  of  'The  Oxford  Univer- 
sity Magazine.'  It  was  in  March,  1834,  that  this 
particular  periodical  began.  It  did  not  overlive  a 
year.  In  it  attention  was  called  to  the  different 
•character  of  the  reviews  of  Tennyson  which  had 
appeared  respectively  in  the  two  Tory  organs. 
"Compare,"  it  said,  "the  article  in  the  Magazine 
with  that  in  the  Quarterly  Eeview.  Here  \^rulent  and 
even  coarse  abuse ;  no  mitigation  and  no  praise  of  any 
sort;  there  ridicule  where  ridicule  was  due — praise  in 
its  right  place ;  the  best  things  extracted  for  commen- 
dation— the  worst  for  blame ;  all  fair  and  above-board. 
No  one  now  doubts  which  was  the  fairer;  if  Alfred 
Tennyson  is  still  more  laught  at  than  wept  over,  it  is 
for  the  same  reason  that  the  philosophy  of  Democritus 
was  more  easily  learnt  than  that  of  Heraclitus;  any- 
body can  laugh,  some  eyes  are  naturally  dry. ' ' 

The  very  words  contained  in  this  protest  against  the 
character  of  the  article  in  the  'Quarterly' — that 
Tennyson  was  more  laught  at  than  wept  over — ^bear 
witness  to  the  effect  it  had  had  in  covering  him  with 
ridicule.  Its  sentiments  were  echoed  and  re-echoed 
by  the  members  of  that  far  from  limited  class  of 
readers  of  little  taste  and  less  discernment,  who, 
lacking  entirely  the  courage  of  their  own  convictions, 
exhibit  a  desperate  hardihood  in  standing  up  for  the 
convictions  of  others.  It  became  the  fashion  to  speak 
disparagingly  of  the  poet  whenever  it  was  thought 
worth  while  to  speak  of  him  at  all.  Men  who  were 
disposed  to  give  expression  to  their  admiration  of  him 


328  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

were  apt  to  do  so  mth  bated  breath.  A  letter  of 
Arthur  Stanley  reveals  incidentally  this  attitude.  It 
was  written  in  September,  1834,  from  the  rectory  of 
Hurstmonceaux.  In  it  he  says  that  Julius  Hare,  with 
whom  he  was  staying,  '*  often  reads  to  us  in  the  even- 
ing things  quite  new  to  me,  for  instance  (tell  it  not 
in  Gath),  A.  Tennyson's  Poems. "^  The  fear  of  the 
Philistines  did  not  prevent  the  future  dean  of  West- 
minster, though  then  only  a  boy,  from  liking  much  that 
he  heard.  But  this  sort  of  courage  could  hardly  be 
expected  of  the  mass  of  men.  The  followers  of  Dagon 
were  not  merely  kept  from  caring  about  the  poet  but 
were  deprived  of  the  disposition  to  become  familiar 
with  his  writings.  This  feeling  naturally  extended  to 
persons  who  would  have  been  fairly  certain  to  admire 
his  work,  had  they  once  come  to  read  it. 

The  attack  in  the  article  did  not  indeed  hurt  Tenny- 
son in  the  eyes  of  the  chosen  circle  which  had  early 
gathered  about  him.  As  his  decriers  had  formed  their 
opinion  of  his  poetry  not  from  reading  it,  but  from 
reading  a  particular  review  of  it;  so  to  some  extent 
the  adherents  of  Tennyson  largely  retorted  in  kind. 
His  admirers,  far  from  heeding  Lockhart's  criticism, 
often  disdained  even  to  look  at  it.  Unfortunately  for 
the  reputation  of  the  poet  his  readers  were  few,  while 
the  readers  of  the  'Quarterly'  were  many.  Illustra- 
tions abound  on  every  side  both  of  the  fervor  of  his 
partisans  and  of  the  ignorance  and  indifference  of  the 
general  public.  For  instance,  Fanny  Kemble  tells  us 
of  the  intense  admiration  she  and  her  family  felt  for 

1' Memoir,'  Vol.  I,  p.  206. 


THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— FIRST  HALF     329 

Tennyson's  poetry  in  these  early  days  of  his  author- 
ship ;  and  of  the  indignation  and  scorn  with  which  they 
received  the  slightest  word  of  adverse  criticism.  The 
contrary  state  of  mind  then  existing  is  brought  out 
distinctly  in  a  story  she  relates  in  the  'Records  of  a 
Girlhood.  '^  From  it  we  can  get  a  fairly  good  concep- 
tion of  the  attitude  taken  by  the  admirers  of  the  poet 
as  well  as  that  of  those  who  obtained  all  their  knowl- 
edge of  him  from  the  article  in  the  'Quarterly.'  "I 
remember,"  she  wrote,  "Mrs.  Milman,  one  evening  at 
my  father's  house,  challenging  me  laughingly  about 
my  enthusiasm  for  Tennyson,  and  asking  me  if  I  had 
read  a  certain  severely  caustic  and  condemnatory 
article  in  the  Quarterly  upon  his  poems.  'Have  you 
read  it?'  said  she;  'it  is  so  amusing!  Shall  I  send  it 
to  you?'  'No,  thank  you,'  said  I;  'have  you  read  the 
poems,  may  I  ask?'  'I  cannot  say  that  I  have,'  said 
she,  laughing.  'Oh,  then,'  said  I  (not  laughing), 
'perhaps  it  would  be  better  that  I  should  send  you 
those.'  " 

The  person  who  is  designated  as  Mrs.  Milman  could 
hardly  have  been  other  than  the  wife  of  the  future 
historian  and  dean  of  St.  Paul's,  in  whose  play  of 
'Fazio'  the  actress  had  early  in  1831  achieved  great 
success  in  the  part  of  Bianca.  But  the  conversation 
could  not  have  taken  place  much  before  the  end  of 
1836  at  best,  and  it  may  have  been  a  good  deal  later; 
for  Fanny  Kemble  left  England  for  America  before 
the  publication  of  Lockhart's  article  and  did  not 
return  from  this  country  till  near  the  close  of  the  year 

ip.  184. 


330  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

just  mentioned.  A  review,  the  memory  of  which  could 
last  for  so  long  a  time  as  this,  must  have  produced 
a  profound  impression  on  many  minds.  Certain  it  is 
that  this  atmosphere  of  disparagement  continued  to 
dwell  about  the  poet  for  many  years  to  come.  In  later 
days  when  Tennyson's  name  and  fame  filled  the  whole 
land,  when  periodicals  were  eager  to  pay  the  highest 
of  prices  for  his  most  ordinary  productions,  his  old 
Cambridge  associates  were  wont  to  contrast  the  respect 
if  not  enthusiasm  which  waited  upon  his  poorest 
achievement  with  the  ridicule  which  the  early  believers 
in  his  genius  encountered  on  almost  every  side.  In 
1859  Stephen  Spring-Rice,  one  of  the  band  which  had 
surrounded  the  poet  at  the  university,  expressed  his 
astonishment  at  the  change  which  had  taken  place  in 
public  opinion.  *'I  hear,"  he  wrote  in  a  letter  to  a 
friend,  ''that  McMillan  has  given  Alfred  £250  for  a 
poem  to  come  out  in  the  next  number  of  his  new 
magazine.  What  a  change!  I  sometimes  feel  a  sort 
of  amazed  perplexity,  reaching  across  a  few  years  to 
pluck  a  fragment  of  the  past  to  compare  it  with  the 
present.  It  seems  an  unreality  to  recall  old  times  at 
Cambridge  when  all  the  world  was  ready  to  laugh 
at  us  for  our  faith  in  Alfred  and  to  compare  it  with 
his  present  popularity. '  '^ 

This  attitude  of  indifference  or  hostility  on  the  part 
of  the  public  had  undoubtedly  been  caused  largely  by 
criticism,  especially  by  that  of  '  The  Quarterly  Review.  * 
For  its  long  continuance,  however,  Tennyson  himself 
must  be  held  almost  wholly  responsible.    His  literary 

1 '  Mrs.  Brookfield  and  her  Circle, '  Vol.  II,  p.  482. 


THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— FIRST  HALF     331 

activity  did  not  cease  with  the  appearance  of  his  second 
volume,  though  in  all  probability  it  is  likely  to  have 
been  curtailed.  What  did  cease  was  the  publication 
of  the  poems  he  then  wrote.  This  course  of  action,  or 
rather  of  inaction,  which  he  adopted,  was  a  fatal 
mistake.  One  consequence  of  the  mistake  was  that 
the  general  recognition  of  his  genius  was  distinctly 
retarded.  Tennyson's  repute,  high  in  a  very  limited 
circle,  would  speedily  have  extended  to  the  world  at 
large,  had  the  publication  of  successive  productions 
brought  his  name  to  its  attention.  A  far  more  serious 
consequence  was  a  failure  in  the  quantity  if  not  the 
quality  of  the  work  he  produced ;  for,  as  has  been  said, 
though  an  author  may  go  on  composing  as  good  prose 
or  even  better  until  an  age  is  reached  when  life  is  no 
longer  so  much  enjoyed  as  it  is  endured,  it  is  not  so 
with  the  writer  of  verse.  In  1835  Tennyson  was 
twenty-six  years  old.  Before  that  date  no  small 
proportion  of  the  poems  had  been  written  which 
contributed  specifically  to  the  success  of  the  edition 
of  1842.  But  though  composed  thus  early,  they  never 
travelled  beyond  the  circle  of  his  personal  friends. 
To  the  world  at  large  he  would  not  give  them.  The 
result  has  already  been  indicated  in  the  delay  of  the 
appreciation  of  his  genius  by  the  public,  and  too 
probably  by  the  loss  of  much  fine  work  which  he  would 
have  written  under  its  encouragement.  Had  Tennyson 
then  continued  to  go  on  publishing,  his  early  career 
would  have  undergone  distinct  change.  He  had 
learned  by  experience  how  unsubstantial  is  the  repu- 
tation  conferred   by   favorable    criticism;   he   would 


332  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

equally  have  learned  how  slight  is  the  injury  wrought 
by  unfavorable  criticism  in  the  face  of  continuous 
great  production.  In  that  case  the  article  in  the 
*  Quarterly'  would  speedily  have  had  at  the  time  itself 
a  more  damaging  effect  upon  the  reputation  of  the 
review  and  the  reviewer  than  upon  the  reputation  of 
the  poet.  Consequently  the  only  successful  answer  to 
the  critic  was  not  merely  to  write  but  to  print.  There 
were  not  wanting  those  who  were  anxious  that  he 
should  take  this  course.  In  the  latter  half  of  1834 
his  brother  Frederick,  then  in  Italy,  wrote  to  him 
urging  him  to  publish  the  following  spring.  This  he 
would  not  do.  Lack  of  health,  lowness  of  spirits,  were 
the  reasons  alleged  for  the  refusal.  He  thus  played 
directly  into  the  hands  of  his  depreciators. 

Had  Hallam  lived,  his  influence  might  have  been 
sufficient  to  overcome  Tennyson's  reluctance  to  try 
once  more  his  fortune  with  the  public;  for  no  opinion 
was  so  potent  as  his  with  the  poet.  But  Hallam  was 
dead.  To  entreaties  from  others  he  refused  to  listen. 
There  was  no  encouragement  in  England,  he  believed, 
for  poetic  production.  The  son  tells  us  that  his  father 
was  so  far  persuaded  that  the  English  people  would 
never  care  for  his  verse  that  he  was  not  disposed  to 
write,  at  all  events  not  to  publish.  The  atmosphere 
of  his  own  country  he  looked  upon  as  so  unsympathetic 
that  he  at  one  time  half  resolved  to  live  abroad  in 
Jersey,  or  in  the  south  of  France,  or  in  Italy.^  There 
is  a  letter  he  wrote  undated — but  probably  belonging 
to  1840  or  1841 — to  a  friend  of  his  residing  in  Florence, 

1 '  Memoir, '  Vol.  I,  p.  97. 


THE  TEN  YEAKS'  SILENCE— FIRST  HALF     333 

telling  him  that  he  had  sometimes  tried,  though  with- 
out effect,  to  persuade  his  family  to  live  abroad.-  It 
"was  the  result  of  this  belief  of  his  and  his  consequent 
attitude  that  with  the  exception  of  the  contributions 
already  mentioned,  to  the  Annuals — and  these  wrung 
from  him  rather  than  contributed — nothing  of  Tenny- 
son's was  printed  during  the  ten  years  which  followed 
the  publication  of  the  volume  of  1832.  So  far  as  his 
reputation  at  the  time  was  concerned,  it  has  already 
been  described  as  a  fatal  mistake;  to  some  extent 
indeed  it  may  have  affected  his  reputation  for  all  time. 
For  his  inaction  belonged  to  that  period  of  life  in  the 
career  of  a  great  poet  when  his  intellectual  activity  is 
most  in  evidence  and  the  result  of  it  usually  most 
successful. 

Many  have  been  the  attempts  to  account  for  this 
prolonged  silence ;  various  have  been  the  reasons  given 
for  it.  Two  of  these  explanations  have  appeared 
frequently.  One  is  that  his  grief  for  the  death  of 
Hallam  paralyzed  for  a  long  period  all  effort.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  the  loss  of  his  friend  stimulated  his 
poetical  activity.  A  more  plausible  though  equally 
worthless  explanation  of  his  failure  to  come  before 
the  public  is  that  it  sprang  from  his  desire  to  perfect 
himself  in  his  art,  and  his  determination  not  to  appear 
in  print  until  that  result  had  been  satisfactorily 
achieved.  Both  these  considerations  may  perhaps 
have  had  some  slight  influence  upon  his  course  of 
action.  It  is  possible  indeed  that  Tennyson  may  have 
tried  to  persuade  himself  that  they  had  great  influence. 

2 'Memoir,'  Vol.  I,  p.  178. 


334  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

But  they  were  certainly  never  controlling  ones.  Too 
much  stress  indeed  cannot  be  placed  upon  their  futility. 
No  far-fetched  or  elaborate  explanations  of  this  sort 
are  necessary.  No  one  can  understand  Tennyson's 
conduct  throughout  his  whole  career  who  does  not 
recognize  his  abnormal  sensitiveness  to  criticism.  It 
mattered  little  or  notliing  how  despicable  was  the 
source  from  which  it  came.  This  sensitiveness  was 
more  than  morbid ;  it  partook  almost  of  the  nature  of 
actual  disease.  It  was  manifest  from  his  earliest 
years.  Even  in  the  admiring  circle  which  gathered 
about  him  in  his  college  days,  it  was  understood  that 
when  he  read  a  poem  no  words  of  critical  censure  were 
to  come  from  his  hearers.  The  same  infirmity  clung 
to  him  in  later  life  when  the  greatest  of  his  contem- 
poraries were  the  loudest  in  his  praises ;  when  to  him 
belonged  the  countenance  of  the  mighty  as  opposed 
to  the  carpings  of  those  who  could  do  little  more  than 
make  faces;  when  indeed  dissent  from  his  supreme 
poetical  pre-eminence  was  scarcely  heard  from  any 
quarter  entitled  to  consideration. 

But  even  then  the  poet's  sensitiveness  did  not  desert 
him.  No  writer,  to  be  sure,  is  likely  to  read  hostile 
criticism  with  unmixed  pleasure.  But  many  authors 
read  it  with  indifference.  More  than  that,  they  not 
unfrequently  read  it  with  contempt,  when  they  recog- 
nize it  as  the  product  of  stupidity,  envy,  or  malice. 
Such,  however,  was  never  the  case  with  Tennyson. 
Even  in  the  height  of  his  fame  the  sting  of  the  puniest 
literary  insect  gave  him  as  much  pain  as  the  applause 
of   the   loftiest   intellect   gave   him   pleasure.     It   is 


THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— FIRST  HALF    335 

probably  safe  to  say  that  the  pain  it  gave  him  was 
greater.  He  himself  admitted  this  fact.  He  was  so 
sensitive  to  hostile  criticism  that  "I  have  heard  him 
say,"  remarked  one  of  his  friends,  "all  the  praise  he 
had  ever  received  didn't  outweigh  for  the  moment  a 
spiteful  and  unkindly  criticism,  even  though  the 
criticism  (he  once  added)  was  directed  against  the 
straightness  of  his  toe-nail.'"  This  sensitiveness  he 
himself  recognized  as  a  weakness;  he  was  in  a  way 
ashamed  of  it;  but  he  could  not  escape  from  it.  He 
knew  as  a  matter  of  fact  that  there  are  men  by  whom 
it  is  discreditable  to  be  praised;  that  disparagement 
is  the  highest  compliment  it  is  in  their  power  to  pay. 
But  while  he  could  see  this,  he  could  not  feel  it.  He 
knew  he  ought  to  rejoice  in  the  censure  of  criticasters ; 
but  he  did  not  rejoice.  ''What  is  the  gadfly  of  irre- 
sponsible criticism  to  youf  said  to  him  one  of  his 
visitors,  while  he  was  at  the  height  of  his  fame.  ''How 
should  you  mind?"  "But  I  do  mind,"  was  the  quick 
rejoinder,  as  of  an  inconsolable  child.^  Consequently, 
however  contemptible  was  the  source  from  which  the 
attack  came,  no  matter  how  impotent  was  the  hand 
which  hurled  the  dart,  the  wound  it  inflicted  festered. 
It  is  hard  for  most  of  us  to  recognize  the  ability  of 
the  petty  nature  to  inflict  pain  upon  the  higher.  The 
most  wretched  of  poetasters,  writhing  under  the  sense 
of  his  inferiority,  could  feel  assured  that  his  attack, 
however  powerless  to  affect  the  poet's  reputation  with 

1 'Memoir,'  Vol.  II,  p.  86. 

2  Miss  E.  E.  Chapman  in  '  The  Eeview  of  Eeviews '  for  November, 
1892. 


I 


336  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

the  public,  could  be  relied  upon  to  cause  suffering  to 
the  poet  himself,  if  it  chanced  to  meet  his  eye. 

There  was  a  partial  justification  for  this  sensitive- 
ness, however  absurd  it  may  seem,  in  the  constantly 
repeated  absurdity  of  the  criticism  received.  All 
through  his  ten  years  of  silence  there  was  a  steady 
uniformity  in  the  character  of  the  charges  brought 
against  Tennyson's  work.  They  were  echoed  and 
re-echoed,  furthermore,  down  to  the  middle  of  the 
century  and  even  later.  In  the  account  of  the  volume 
of  1832,  it  has  already  been  recorded  that  again  and 
again  he  was  taken  to  task  specifically  for  ''affecta- 
tion." This  accusation  fairly  ran  rampant  in  the 
criticism  of  his  early  writings.  For  at  least  a  score 
of  years  it  was  never  omitted  when  any  pretext  could 
be  devised  for  lugging  it  in.  It  seems  to  have  made  its 
first  public  appearance  in  'Blackwood's  Magazine'; 
at  all  events  its  occurrence  there  gave  it  standing. 
Having  gained  a  foothold  in  that  periodical,  it  was 
repeated  with  wearisome  iteration  hj  every  critic  of 
the  time.  It  was  a  fairly  safe  charge  to  bring;  for 
it  was  vague.  It  saved  all  trouble  of  thinking.  It  is 
manifestly  clear  that  many  and  probably  most  who 
used  it  had  not  the  slightest  idea  of  what  they  meant 
by  it ;  for  at  the  time  there  were  others  against  whom 
the  same  accusation  was  brought.  Accordingly  it  is 
none  too  easy  for  the  modern  reader  to  comprehend 
what  the  bringer  of  the  charge  manifestly  did  not. 
Still  as  commonly  understood,  at  least  as  then  fre- 
quently stated,  it  seems  to  have  consisted  largely  in 
three  things.     First,  there  was   the   poet's   asserted 


THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— FIRST  HALF     337 

practice  of  making  Greek  compounds  out  of  honest 
Saxon  phrases.  Thej  were  joined  together  so  as 
to  seem  one  word  instead  of  being  kept  apart  so  as 
to  form  two.  Consequently  there  was  no  small  num- 
ber of  compounds  such  as  altarthrone,  Maymorning, 
mountainstream,  lily  garlands,  cloverhills,  turretstairs, 
and  particularly  a  large  collection  of  those  beginning 
with  the  word  summer,  such  as  summerflowers, 
summermoon,  summerplain,  summer  pride,  summer- 
vault,  summerview,  and  summerwoods.  This  was  due, 
as  Tennyson  himself  said  late  in  life,  to  an  absurd 
aversion  he  had  at  that  time  to  hyphens.  This  aversion 
did  not  last  long,  and  the  practice  w^as  abandoned  after 
the  publication  of  his  first  volume.  But  of  itself  it 
manifestly  had  not  the  slightest  weight  in  determining 
the  value  of  the  poetry  as  poetry. 

A  second  evidence  of  affectation  was  the  employment 
of  archaic  or  obsolete  or  unusual  words.  These 
Tennyson's  familiarity  with  our  earlier  literature  led 
him  occasionally  to  introduce.  As  with  them  the  critic 
was  usually  not  acquainted,  he  was  led  by  his  igno- 
rance to  regard  them  with  peculiar  disfavor.  He 
seemed  to  feel  it  a  sort  of  personal  affront  that  his 
author  should  be  familiar  with  something  he  himself 
knew  nothing  about.  But  the  third  and  the  most 
common  of  the  acts  which  subjected  him  to  the  charge 
of  affectation  was  that  he  printed  his  words  as  no  one 
had  ever  printed  them  before.  Pie  had,  it  was  asserted, 
so  much  more  faith  in  the  length  of  his  readers'  ears 
than  in  their  quality, — it  was  a  faith  fully  justified 
in  the  case  of  certain  of  his  critics — that  he  took  pains 


338  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

to  provide  at  his  own  care  and  cost  the  music  of  his 
verse  by  accenting  the  final  ed  of  the  past  participle, 
when  it  was  to  be  pronounced  as  a  separate  syllable. 
It  is  obvious  that  the  practice  censured  is,  like  the 
first,  a  peculiarity  of  printing  and  not  of  expression. 
Like  that,  too,  it  has  no  bearing  upon  the  value  of  the 
verse  as  verse. 

One  however  would  infer  from  the  frequency  with 

which  this  purely  conventional  proceeding  is  mentioned 

that  critical  imbecility  had  exalted  it  into  a  matter 

of  dearest  concern  and  direst  consequence.     It  finds 

expression   in   article    after   article   which   appeared 

during   the   ten   years    of    silence.     Even    after    the 

publication  of  the  edition  of  1842,  it  turns  up  at  first 

not  infrequently.    It  is  found  even  in  John  Forster's 

review  of  the  poems  in  '  The  Examiner. '    He  observed 

there  that  the  affectation  in  the  way  of  printing  had 

been  quietly  dropped.     This  charitable  view  was  not 

taken  by  all  others.     The   asserted   affectation   still 

continued  to  be  insisted  upon.    With  the  growing  fame 

of   the   poet   this    once   prevalent   kind   of   criticism 

generally  disappeared.     Still  it  was  always  liable  to 

turn  up  if  the  reviewer  had  nothing  else  to  say  when 

he  had  undertaken  the  task  of  finding  fault.     It  is 

occasionally  heard  even  in  our   own  time;   for   few 

things  have  the  vitality  of  feeble  criticism.    But  under 

any    conception    of   what   was    meant   by    the    term 

''affectation,"   altogether  too  much   stress  was  laid 

upon  it.     Poe,  in  speaking  mth  a  good  deal  of  scorn 

of  the  method  of  decrying  impliedly  the  higher  merits 

of  an  author  by  insisting  upon  the  lower,  drew  one 


THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— FIRST  HALF    339 

of  his  illustrations  of  the  practice  from  remarks  of 
this  kind  made  upon  the  poet.  ' '  Tennyson, ' '  he  wrote, 
*  *  perceiving  how  vividly  an  imaginative  effect  is  aided, 
now  and  then,  by  a  certain  quaintness  judiciously 
introduced,  brings  the  latter,  at  times,  in  support  of 
his  most  glorious  and  most  delicate  imagination; — 
whereupon  his  brother  poets  hasten  to  laud  the  imagi- 
nation of  Mr.  Somebody,  whom  nobody  imagined  to 
have  any,  ^and  the  somewhat  affected  quaintness  of 
Tennyson.'  " 

Two  other  charges  there  were  which  frequently 
appeared  in  the  criticism  of  Tennyson  during  this 
fourth  decade  and  even  later.  They  are  apparently 
contradictory.  One  is  that  he  was  obscure;  the  other 
that  he  failed  in  the  exhibition  of  profound  reflective- 
ness. Contradictory  as  they  might  seem,  they  flour- 
ished vigorously  side  by  side.  The  former  turns  up 
with  a  fair  degree  of  frequency;  the  latter  was  heard 
rather  more  often.  It  was  not  uncommon  to  have  it 
asserted  that  Tennyson  concealed  his  lack  of  ideas 
behind  a  gorgeous  raiment  of  words.  It  was  in  a 
measure  a  just  penalty  for  his  own  one-time  charac- 
terization of  Byron's  poetry  as  rhetoric,  that  he  him- 
self should  have  been  made  later  the  recipient  of  this 
same  sort  of  cheap  critical  comment.  It  was  intimated 
again  and  again  that  he  lacked  Thought — it  was 
invariably  thought  mth  a  capital  letter  in  which  it 
was  implied  that  he  was  deficient.  This  want  of 
thought  w^as  much  deplored  by  critics  who  had  some- 
how got  the  impression  that  they  themselves  were  in 
the  habit  of  thinking. 


340  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

There  seems  indeed  to  be  a  belief  among  many  that 
poetry,  to  be  really  great,  must  be  surcharged  with 
profound  thought.  Verse  which  lacks  this  quality 
can  never  be  deemed  of  a  high  order.  Now  thought 
in  the  finest  and  highest  sense  of  the  word  is  always 
likely  to  occur  in  great  poetry.  But  it  is  not  necessary 
to  its  existence,  nor  to  the  effect  produced  by  it.  In 
truth,  the  passages  which  require  the  least  intellectual 
exertion  on  the  part  of  the  reader  are  very  frequently 
those  which  make  the  most  powerful  appeal  to  the 
heart.  For  the  poet  it  is  amply  sufficient  to  utter  in 
a  way  no  one  else  can  that  which  we  all  think  and  feel 
but  for  which  none  of  us  are  able  to  find  adequate 
expression.  The  great  artist  comes  along  and  says 
for  us  what  we  say  clumsily  or  at  best  unimpressively. 
He  says  it  too  in  such  a  way  that  it  never  has  to  be 
said  again.  The  idea  has  had  its  definite  setting. 
The  history  of  scores  of  the  most  famous  poems  prove 
the  truth  of  this  contention.  It  is  in  the  power  of 
genius  alone  to  lift  the  common  out  of  the  region  of 
the  commonplace  and  clothe  it  with  imperishable 
beauty.  It  cannot  be  maintained  that  *L 'Allegro'  and 
*I1  Penseroso,'  with  their  opposing  views  of  life, 
convey  observations  which  are  peculiarly  profound. 
Few  of  the  great  elegiac  poems  contain  reflections  that 
startle  us  by  their  novelty  or  impress  us  by  their  depth. 
To  do  anything  of  the  sort  is  not  their  business.  That 
is  to  give  utterance  to  sentiments  which  are  common 
to  all  of  us  but  which  are  for  the  first  time  expressed 
in  words  that  all  of  us  feel. 

There  is  nothing,  for  instance,  in  Gray's  'Elegy  in 


THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— FIRST  HALF     341 

a  Country  Churchyard'  which  is  novel  or  startling 
in  the  way  of  a  contribution  to  thought.  There  is  not 
a  sentence  in  it  which  cannot  be  comprehended  by  any 
one  at  a  single  reading.  There  are  in  it  no  allusions 
to  perplexing  problems  of  life  or  duty  or  destiny.  The 
reflections  it  embodies  are  such  as  would  occur  to  any 
one  who  reflected  at  all.  Yet  no  poem  of  its  character, 
perhaps  no  short  poem  of  any  character,  ever  attained 
a  popularity  so  immediate  and  has  retained  it  so 
unbrokenly  during  all  the  revolutions  of  taste  which 
have  gone  on  since  its  publication.  Gray  himself  was 
so  conscious  that  there  was  in  the  'Elegy'  nothing 
which  had  not  been  thought  and  felt  and  said  by 
thousands  that  he  was  a  good  deal  astounded  and 
apparently  somewhat  disgusted  by  the  phenomenal 
success  which  at  once  waited  upon  it.  He  considered 
it  as  being  little  more  than  a  collection  of  common- 
places. There  was  nothing  in  it,  he  said,  which  any 
one  might  not  have  uttered.  In  one  sense  this  was 
true.  What  he  failed  to  take  into  consideratiou  was 
that  the  reflections  we  all  make  and  the  feelings  we  all 
entertain  it  requires  genius  to  convey  in  a  permanent 
and  effective  form — the  felicity  of  expression,  the 
beauty  which  make  them  linger  in  the  memory  and 
cause  them  to  become  part  of  the  imperishable  riches 
of  the  literature  of  the  language  in  which  they  appear. 
The  foolish  criticism  of  the  various  kinds  here 
specified  painfully  affected  Tennyson's  peculiarly 
sensitive  nature.  To  a  man  so  constituted  the  ill 
reception  accorded  to  his  second  venture  had  an  effect 
which  it  is  almost  impossible  for  the  ordinary  writer 


342  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

to  conceive.  He  had  described  the  poet  as  dowered 
not  only  with  the  love  of  love  and  the  hate  of  hate,  but 
also  with  the  scorn  of  scorn.  If  this  last  attribute  be 
essential  to  the  poetic  nature,  no  one  was  ever  more 
signally  lacking  in  it  than  himself.  After  the  gener- 
ally hostile  criticism  the  volume  of  1832  had  received, 
but  more  especially  after  the  attack  in  a  periodical 
wielding  the  wide  influence  of  the  'Quarterly,'  he  was 
averse  to  having  his  name  brought  before  the  public 
in  any  form,  even  indeed  for  praise.  A  singular 
illustration  of  this  state  of  mind  comes  to  light  in 
connection  with  criticism  of  which  there  will  be  occa- 
sion to  speak  later  in  detail.  He  had  heard  from  a 
friend  that  John  Stuart  Mill  was  going  to  review  him. 
Furthermore,  he  was  going  to  review  him  favorably. 
Against  any  action  of  the  sort  Tennyson  protested. 
* '  It  is  the  last  thing  I  wish  for, ' '  he  wrote  to  Spedding. 
''I  would,"  he  continued,  ''that  you  or  some  other 
who  may  be  friends  of  Mill  would  hint  as  much  to  him. 
/  do  not  wish  to  he  dragged  forward  again  in  any  shape 
before  the  reading  public  at  present,  particularly  on 
the  score  of  my  old  poems,  most  of  which  I  have  so 
corrected  (particularly  'OEnone')  as  to  make  them 
much  less  imperfect,  which  you  who  are  a  wise  man 
would  own  if  you  had  the  corrections."^  The  italics 
here  are  the  poet's  own. 

In  the  generally  unfavorable  criticism  to  which  he 
was  subjected  during  the  years  immediately  following 
the  publication  of  the  volume  of  1832,  there  was 
occasionally  a  half-hearted  recognition  of  his  genius 

1 '  Memoir, '  Vol.  I,  p.  145. 


THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— FIRST  HALF     343 

based  e\ddeiitly  not  so  much  on  the  critic's  apprecia- 
tion of  it  as  on  his  appreciation  of  the  fact  that  behind 
the  poet  was  a  body  of  small  but  earnest  and  able 
admirers.  In  1833  Allan  Cunningham  contributed  to 
'The  Athenaeum'  a  series  of  papers  upon  the  literature 
of  the  preceding  fifty  years.  Towards  the  conclusion 
he  gave  an  account  of  the  younger  writers.  These 
articles  were  subsequently  collected  and  published  in 
a  volume.  The  criticism  it  contains  is  usually  of  the 
most  commonplace  character.  To  us  now,  the  work, 
however,  is  interesting  for  the  cautious  way  in  which 
it  dealt  with  Tennyson,  its  careful  repetition  of  the 
current  critical  cant  about  his  language  and  expres- 
sion, but  above  all  for  the  acknowledgment  it  makes 
of  the  existence  of  a  band  of  men  who  had  more  insight 
than  their  contemporaries.  *' Alfred  Tennyson," 
wrote  Cunningham,  "has  a  happy  fancy;  his  origi- 
nality of  thought  is  sometimes  deformed  by  oddity 
of  language;  and  his  subject  has  not  unfrequently  to 
bear  the  weight  of  sentiments  which  spring  not  nat- 
urally from  it.  He  has  lyrical  ease  and  vigour,  and 
is  looked  upon  by  sundry  critics  as  the  chief  living 
hope  of  the  Muse. ' ' 

There  was  during  this  period  one  specific  piece  of 
criticism,  of  which  Tennyson  was  made  the  subject, 
that  is  worth  recording  here,  because  singularly 
enough  it  has  been  frequently  cited  as  an  evidence  of 
the  high  appreciation  in  which  he  was  beginning  to 
be  held  at  that  early  time.  It  is  a  sort  of  appreciation 
from  which  a  man  of  sense  might  well  pray  to  be 
delivered.    Coleridge  had  died  in  1834.    In  May,  1835, 


344  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

appeared  two  volumes  of  specimens  of  his  'Table 
Talk'  under  the  editorship  of  his  nephew  and  son- 
in-law,  Henry  Nelson  Coleridge.  It  is  too  often  the 
misfortune  of  a  man  of  genius  that  his  foolishest 
observations  are  recorded  and  cherished  as  evidence 
of  almost  superhuman  insight.  Coleridge's  table  talk 
is  an  interesting  collection  of  his  utterances  on  all  sorts 
of  subjects,  full  of  wisdom  and  of  unwisdom,  contain- 
ing reflections  of  profoundest  significance  and  of 
keenest  appreciation  intermixed  with  the  display  of 
the  most  senseless  prejudices  and  at  times  of  astound- 
ing ignorance.  In  this  work  under  date  of  April  24, 
1833,  he  is  represented  as  paying  his  respects  to  the 
poet  in  the  following  words.  '*I  have  not,"  he  said, 
''read  through  all  Mr.  Tennyson's  poems,  which  have 
been  sent  to  me ;  but  I  think  there  are  some  things  of 
a  good  deal  of  beauty  in  what  I  have  seen.  The 
misfortune  is,  that  he  has  begun  to  write  verses 
without  very  well  understanding  what  metre  is.  Even 
if  you  write  in  a  known  and  approved  metre,  the  odds 
are,  if  you  are  not  a  metrist  yourself,  that  you  will 
not  write  harmonious  verses ;  but  to  deal  in  new  metres 
without  considering  what  metre  means  and  requires, 
is  preposterous.  What  I  would,  mth  many  wdshes  for 
success,  prescribe  to  Tennyson, — indeed  without  it  he 
can  never  be  a  poet  in  act, — is  to  write  for  the  next 
two  or  three  years  in  none  but  one  or  two  well-known 
and  strictly  defined  metres,  such  as  the  heroic  couplet, 
the  octave  stanza,  or  the  octo-syllabic  measure  of  the 
Allegro  and  Penseroso.  He  would,  probably,  thus  get 
imbued  with  a  sensation,  if  not  a  sense,  of  metre. 


THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— FIRST  HALF     345 

without  knowing  it,  just  as  Eton  boys  get  to  write 
such  good  Latin  verses  by  conning  0\n.d  and  Tibullus. 
As  it  is,  I  can  scarcely  scan  his  verses. ' ' 

This  pretentious  piece  of  ad^dce  has  been  given  here 
in  full  not  because  it  is  intrinsically  of  the  slightest 
earthly  importance,  but  because  on  the  one  hand  it 
has  been  spoken  of  as  conveying  an  appreciative 
tribute  to  Tennyson  himself;  and  on  the  other  hand 
because  of  the  various  attempts  that  have  been  made 
to  reconcile  its  oracular  utterances  with  its  complete 
failure  to  conform  to  later  fact,  and  mth  its  assump- 
tion of  superiority  in  a  matter  in  which  the  speaker, 
great  as  was  the  genius  he  possessed,  was  distinctly 
inferior  to  the  writer  upon  whose  performance  he  was 
commenting  J  The  whole  criticism  is  indeed  on  a  level 
^vith  some  of  Coleridge's  linguistic  and  even  literary 
pronouncements  in  which  the  extreme  of  ignorance 
was  often  combined  with  the  extreme  of  positive 
assertion,  Tennyson,  we  know,  saw  and  read  this 
passage.  It  is  hardly  necessary  to  observe  that  he 
did  not  follow  the  patronizing  advice  given  in  it ;  that 
for  the  next  two  or  three  years  he  did  not  confine 
himself  to  the  three  measures  prescribed  for  Ms 
guidance,  though  unless  he  did  so,  he  was  assured  that 
he  would  never  become  ''a  poet  in  act."  In  spite  of 
his  disregard  of  this  volunteered  counsel,  there  is  a 
general  impression  that  he  did  become  a  poet — a  much 
greater  one  indeed  than  his  counsellor.  Coleridge's 
critical  discernment  was  in  this  instance  about  equal 
to  his  prophetic  vision.  His  appreciation  was  no  more 
illuminating  than  it  was  enthusiastic. 


346  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

The  only  critical  utterance  of  this  period  on  the 
productions  of  the  poet  which  still  remains  worth 
reading  after  the  lapse  of  four  fifths  of  a  century, 
came  from  a  quarter  from  which  it  would  hardly  have 
been  expected.  It  was  the  work  of  John  Stuart  Mill. 
Tennyson  had  protested,  as  we  have  seen,  against  the 
publication  of  this  review,  even  though  he  had  heard 
it  was  to  be  of  a  favorable  character.  If  his  objection 
ever  came  to  the  ears  of  the  writer,  it  had  no  effect 
whatever  upon  his  action.  The  name  of  Mill  indeed 
might  seem  to  be  one  that  would  not  suggest  a  man 
who  would  be  inclined  to  sjnupathize  with  the  peculiar 
characteristics  which  distinguish  Tennyson's  verse. 
But  nowhere  was  there  published  then — perhaps  it  is 
safe  to  add  nowhere  has  there  been  published  since — a 
more  appreciative  criticism  of  the  work  which  the  poet 
had  up  to  this  time  produced,  a  keener  and  more  dis- 
criminating study  of  its  merits  and  defects  than  can  be 
found  in  the  article  which  the  future  political  econo- 
mist then  published.  The  criticism  appeared  in  the 
second  number  of  'The  London  Review,"  a  short-lived 
quarterly  which  had  been  started  in  1835  in  conse- 
quence of  the  dissatisfaction  of  the  so-called  philo- 
sophical radicals  with  the  course  of  the  'Westminster.' 
In  the  following  year,  however,  the  two  periodicals 
were  united.  Not  merely  for  its  coming  from  the  man 
it  did,  but  for  the  character  of  its  criticism,  this  article 
merits  a  detailed  examination. 

** Towards  the  close  of  1830,"  Mill  began,  ''appeared 
a  small  volume  of  poems,  the  work  of  a  young  and 

1  Vol.  I,  p.  402,  July,  1835. 


THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— FIRST  HALF    347 

unknown  author,  and  which,  with  considerable  faults 
(some  of  them  of  a  bad  kind),  gave  evidence  of  powers 
such  as  had  not  for  many  years  been  displayed  by  any 
new  aspirant  to  the  character  of  a  poet.     The  first 
publication  was  followed  in  due  time  by  a  second  in 
which  the  faults  of  its  predecessor  were  still  visible, 
but  were  evidently  on  the  point  of  disappearing ;  while 
the  positive  excellence  was  not  only  greater  and  more 
uniformly  sustained,  but  of  a  higher  order."    In  these 
opening  sentences,  the  general  tone  of  Mill's  criticism 
was  indicated.    When  it  came  to  detail,  he  pointed  out 
as  Tennyson's  most  characteristic  excellence  the  power 
of  scene-painting  in  the  higher  sense  of  the  term — 
that   is,    not   the    cheap    representation    of    external 
phenomena,   but   the   power   of   creating   scenery   to 
harmonize  with  the  state  of  mind  of  the  individual 
portrayed.    His  principal  illustration  is  the  sufficiently 
marked  one  of  the  poem  in  the  volume  of  1830  entitled 
*  Mariana.'     In  this  piece  the  love  story  at  the  base 
of  it  is  suggested  in  the  refrain  alone;  even  in  that 
it  is  only  suggested,  it  is  not  detailed.     The  whole 
strength  of  the  writer  is  put  forth  in  the  portrayal 
of  the  desolation  of  the  moated  grange  to  correspond 
with    the    wretchedness    and    gloom    of    the    woman 
abandoned  by  her  lover.     The  level  waste,  the  black- 
ened waters  of  the  sluice,  the  decay  of  all  objects 
pertaining  to  the  once  busy  household  life,  the  flower- 
pots crusted  by  the  encroaching  moss,  the  creaking  of 
doors   upon  rusty  hinges,   the   shriek  of  the  mouse 
behind  the  mouldering  wainscot,  these  and  numerous 
other  details  impart  to  the  situation  of  the  deserted 


348  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

maiden  a  sensation  of  dreariness  which  pages  of 
description  could  not  convey.  Furthermore,  Mill 
quoted  in  full  the  second  part  of  'The  May  Queen,' 
termed  'New  Year's  Eve,'  as  a  specimen  of  simple 
genuine  pathos  arising  out  of  situations  and  feelings 
common  to  all  mankind,  and  therefore  fitted  for  a 
more  extensive  popularity  than  any  other  poem  in 
the  two  volumes.  But  the  reviewer's  o^vn  favorite 
was  '  The  Lady  of  Shalott. '  With  the  exception  of  its 
last  stanza  which,  as  it  appeared  in  its  original  form, 
he  disliked,  he  gave  this  piece  in  full.  He  asserted  that 
it  must  be  ranked  among  the  very  first  of  its  class  in 
the  combination  of  the  powers  of  narration  and  of 
scene-painting.  Though  he  deemed  its  versification 
less  exquisite,  he  placed  the  poem  in  other  respects 
by  the  side  of  'The  Ancient  Mariner'  and  ' Christabel. ' 
Mill 's  criticism  was  as  much  a  review  of  the  volume 
of  1830  as  of  that  of  1832.  Of  the  poems  contained 
in  the  former  he  spoke  with  commendation  of  the 
'Recollections  of  the  Arabian  Nights,'  *'The  Dying 
Swan,'  'The  Kraken,'  'The  Sleeping  Beauty,'  and  of 
the  two  poems  beginning  "In  the  gloomy  light"  and 
"A  spirit  haunts  the  year's  last  hours."  These  last 
in  his  opinion  were  improperly  called  songs.  The 
pieces  in  the  second  volume  which  he  specifically 
praised — frequently  mth  more  or  less  of  quotation — 
were  'Isabel,'  'Eleanore,'  'The  Sisters,'  'CEnone,' 
'The  Palace  of  Art,'  and  'The  Lotos-Eaters.'  With 
the  mention  of  all  these  he  declared  that  he  had  by 
no  means  exhausted  the  variety  of  beauty  to  be  found 
in  the  two  volumes.    But  Mill,  though  he  pointed  out 


THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— FIRST  HALF     349 

the  qualities  in  which  in  his  opinion  Tennyson  excelled, 
was  not  in  the  least  blind  to  what  he  deemed  his 
defects.  Accordingly  it  may  be  worth  while  to  specify 
what  a  man  of  so  much  intellectual  power  found  to 
censure  as  well  as  to  praise  in  poems  upon  the  exact 
value  of  which  the  consensus  of  the  generation  had 
not  even  begun  to  settle.  Mill  looked  upon  'Claribel,' 
the  verses  headed  'Elegiacs,'  and  'A  Dirge'  as  com- 
parative failures.  Worse  failures  than  these  were 
'The  Merman'  and  'The  Mermaid.'  In  them  the  poet 
was  actually  puerile.  Upon  the  patriotic  productions, 
as  we  may  call  them,  he  was  especially  severe.  Of  two 
pieces  in  particular,  the  'English  War  song'  and  the 
'National  Song,'  he  was  of  the  opinion  that  "unless 
they  are  meant  for  bitter  ridicule  of  vulgar  nation- 
ality, and  of  the  poverty  of  intellect  which  usually 
accompanies  it,  their  appearance  here  is  unaccount- 
able." The  same  remark  was  made  about  the  sonnet 
on  Bonaparte.  If  not  so  childish  in  manner,  it  had 
still  something  of  the  same  spirit  which  characterized 
the  preceding  two  just  mentioned — that  is,  if  these 
were  to  be  taken  as  serious. 

Certain  too  of  the  small  poems  Mill  regarded  as 
without  meaning;  or  at  least,  if  the  author  had  a 
meaning,  he  had  not  been  able  to  express  it.  The  ones 
he  specified  as  liable  to  this  censure  were  the  two  songs 
to  the  'Owl,'  the  verses  entitled  'The  How  and  the 
Why,'  and  a  little  poem  of  eight  lines  beginning  with 
the  words  "Who  can  say."  This  Mill  entitled  'Today 
and  Yesterday.'  These  and  two  others  are  the  only 
ones  in  the  second  volume  which  he  cared  to  have 


350  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

omitted,  though  there  were  two  more  which  he  looked 
upon  as  unsatisfactory,  though  not  positive  failures. 
These  two  were  the  poem  beginning  "All  good  things 
have  not  kept  aloof,"  and  the  one  entitled  'Hes- 
perides,'  notwithstanding  what  he  conceded  to  be  its 
fine  opening.  The  two  to  be  positively  rejected  were 
the  lines  on  Christopher  North  and  the  stanzas  of 
*0  Darling  Room'  which  he  characterized  as  a  ''little 
piece  of  childishness." 

In  nothing  did  Mill  show  the  superiority  of  his 
estimate  of  the  poetry  that  Tennyson  had  up  to  that 
time  produced  over  the  silly  criticism  which  had  then 
current  vogue,  than  in  his  treatment  of  the  volume 
of  1832  as  compared  with  that  of  1830.  He  spoke  with 
the  contempt  it  deserved  of  the  common  assertion  that 
the  late  volume  had  fallen  off  from  the  poetic  power 
displayed  in  the  earlier.  The  superiority  of  the 
second  venture  he  emphatically  proclaimed.  There 
were  but  few  pieces  in  it  to  which  he  took  exception. 
More  than  that  he  did  not  fail  to  make  emphatic  that 
not  only  had  there  been  no  falling  off  but  how  almost 
immeasurable  had  been  the  advance  which  Tennyson 
had  made  during  the  nearly  thirty  months  that  had 
elapsed  between  the  publication  of  the  two  volumes. 
This  we  all  see  now;  then  it  had  been  hid  from  the 
majority  of  professional  critics,  and  continued  to  be 
hid  for  many  years  later.  The  first  volume,  he  said, 
gave  evidence  of  powers  such  as  had  not  for  many 
years  been  displayed  by  any  new  aspirant  to  the 
character  of  poet.  In  the  second,  while  the  faults  of 
its  predecessor  were  still  visible,  they  were  evidently 


THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— FIRST  HALF    351 

on  the  point  of  disappearing.  The  positive  excellences 
of  the  poet  were  not  only  greater  and  more  uniformly 
sustained,  but  they  were  of  a  distinctly  higher  order. 
His  imagination  and  his  reason  had  alike  advanced. 
Mill  did  not  predict  positively  his  future;  but  he 
clearly  indicated,  that  if  the  poet  corrected  the  few 
faults  he  still  possessed,  a  high  place  in  English 
literature  would  be  securely  his. 

Mill's  article  was  the  first  public  manifestation  of 
the  reaction  against  the  estimate  of  Tennyson  which 
had  been  generally  current  in  periodical  literature 
after  the  publication  of  the  volume  of  1832.  But  it  is 
full  as  noticeable  for  the  review  of  Tennyson 's  re- 
^dewer — though  his  name  was  not  mentioned — as  for 
his  criticism  of  the  poet.  The  different  character  of 
the  two  notices  w%ich  the  volumes  had  received,  the 
one  in  'Blackwood's  Magazine'  and  the  other  in  the 
'Quarterly,'  had,  as  we  have  seen,  more  than  once 
attracted  attention.  Mill  in  turn  discussed  these 
articles.  To  the  one  in  the  monthly  he  did  exact 
justice.  That  it  displayed  the  usual  levity  and 
flippancy  of  that  periodical  he  conceded.  But  it  also 
evinced  one  of  its  better  characteristics,  a  genuine 
appreciation  and  willing  recognition  of  genius.  The 
praise  or  blame  in  it,  though  shovelled  out  rather 
than  measured,  was  on  the  whole  fairly  discriminating. 
Accordingly  in  his  opinion,  Tennyson's  lines  to 
Christopher  North  merely  expressed  in  a  common- 
place way  the  author's  resentment  against  a  critique 
which  merited  from  him  no  resentment,  but  rather,  all 
things  considered,  a  directly  contrary  feeling.    On  the 


352  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

other  hand,  Mill  had  hardly  language  sufficiently 
contemptuous  to  express  his  opinion  of  the  article 
in  'The  Quarterly  Re\dew. '  The  method  its  writer 
had  followed  he  declared  to  be  the  abundantly  hack- 
neyed one  of  selecting  the  few  bad  passages  in  the 
volume — not  amounting  to  three  pages  in  all — and 
such  others  as,  by  being  separated  from  the  context, 
might  be  made  to  appear  ridiculous.  These  were  then 
held  uj)  as  specimens  of  the  whole  work.  Not  only 
was  the  method  bad,  but  in  his  opinion  the  execution 
was  worse.  The  criticism  was  in  a  strain  of  dull  irony, 
the  point  of  which  consisted  in  its  ill  nature.  Mill's 
treatment  of  the  reviewer  cannot  itself  be  deemed  a 
triumph  of  amiability.  He  styled  him  in  one  place 
*'the  small  critic  of  the  Quarterly,"  in  another  ''the 
egregious  critic,"  and  the  second  epithet  conveys  not 
even  so  complimentary  a  sense  as  the  first.  He  cites 
some  of  his  remarks  to  comment  on  their  imbecility. 
His  general  impression  of  'The  Quarterly  Review' 
itself  may  be  summed  up  in  his  assertion  that  the 
periodical  in  question,  both  under  its  original  and 
under  its  present  management,  never  recognized  any 
new  claim  upon  its  admiration  unless  it  was  recom- 
mended by  party  interest  or  was  forced  upon  it  by 
the  public  voice. 

During  the  years  which  followed  his  father's  death 
till  the  time  of  his  own  marriage,  Tennyson's  regular 
home  was  with  the  family.  As  it  continued  to  remain 
at  Somersby  until  1837,  that  was  naturally  his  resi- 
dence during  this  particular  period.  From  the  place 
itself,    however,    he    constantly   made    excursions    of 


THE  TEN  YEAKS'  SILENCE— FIRST  HALF     353 

greater  or  less  length.  Their  frequency  and  extent 
indeed  depended  largely  upon  the  contents  of  his 
pocket-book;  but  we  hear  of  him  at  times  in  various 
parts  of  Great  Britain.  It  was  on  one  of  these  excur- 
sions that  his  previously  slight  acquaintance  with 
FitzGerald  ripened  into  friendship.  FitzGerald  was 
born  the  same  year  as  he.  He  entered  Cambridge 
University  in  1826  and  was  graduated  in  1830.  But 
though  during  two  years  of  this  time  he  was  a  member 
of  the  same  college  as  Tennyson,  they  seem  never  to 
have  met  until  some  little  time  after  they  had  both 
left  the  institution.  This  too  in  spite  of  the  fact  that 
FitzGerald  himself  was  intimate  with  two  or  three 
persons  who  were  special  friends  of  the  poet.  One  of 
these  was  Spedding.  It  was  while  on  a  ^dsit  to  him 
at  his  father's  residence,  Mirehouse  on  Bassenthwaite 
Lake,  that  Tennyson  and  he  became  intimate.  The 
acquaintance  indeed  was  without  doubt  largely  helped 
on  by  the  weather ;  for  during  the  three  weeks  of  their 
stay,  that  was  simply  abominable.  Eain  prevailed 
constantly.  This  naturally  threw  them  much  of  the 
time  upon  each  other  for  entertainment. 

Spedding 's  father  was  what  is  called  a  practical 
man,  and  he  manifestly  had  no  great  admiration  for 
the  two  unpractical  visitors  who  were  special  friends 
of  his  son,  particularly  for  the  poetical  one.  He  was, 
however,  very  courteous  to  his  guests.  All  he  asked 
for  himself  was  to  be  let  alone;  and  interested  as  he 
was  in  the  care  of  his  farm,  and  absent  much  of  the 
daj^  from  the  house,  it  was  an  easy  matter  to  comply 
with  his  wishes  in  this  particular.     A  man  evidently 


354  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

of  a  high  ty^ie  of  character,  he  was  from  the  purely 
literary  point  of  view  a  fair  representative  of  the 
hard-headed,  middle-class  Philistine.  So  far  as  poets 
were  concerned,  the  best  he  could  do  was  to  regard 
them  as  specimens  of  a  mild  type  of  lunatic.  In  that 
region  Coleridge  and  Shelley  had  resided  for  a  longer 
or  shorter  time.  The  older  Spedding  had  seen  too 
much  of  them  and  other  verse-makers  to  think  very 
highly  of  them  or  their  trade.  He  naturally  could  not 
see  much  sense  in  the  interest  manifested  by  his  son 
in  such  trifles  as  lines  about  the  death  of  Arthur  and 
about  the  Lord  of  Burleigh  and  other  pieces  which 
were  later  to  make  up  part  of  the  volumes  of  1842. 
FitzGerald  indeed  heard  read  during  this  visit  'The 
Day  Dream,'  'Dora,'  and  'The  Gardener's  Daughter.' 
Polite  as  Spedding 's  father  was,  it  was  probably  with 
no  great  grief  that  he  saw  his  two  visitors  take  their 
departure  in  company  with  his  son,  at  the  end  of  May. 
The  three  repaired  to  Ambleside  on  Lake  Winder- 
mere where  two  of  them  stayed  a  week.  But  though 
Wordsworth's  home  was  in  the  immediate  neighbor- 
hood, Tennyson  could  not  be  induced  to  visit  him  in 
spite  of  Spedding 's  urgency.  For  that  his  invincible 
shyness  stood  in  the  way.  His  refusal  he  must  have 
remembered  with  gratification  in  later  years  when 
visitors  from  all  parts  of  the  globe  were  knocking  in 
season  and  out  of  season  at  his  own  doors.  Tennyson, 
however,  did  come  in  contact  with  Hartley  Coleridge 
who  took  to  him  mightily,  and  after  the  fourth 
"bottom"  of  gin  thanked  the  Lord  for  having  brought 
them  together.     But  he  manifestly  did  not  make  any 


THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— FIRST  HALF     355 

such  favorable  impression  upon  some  of  those  he  had 
left  behind.  If  while  he  was  at  Mirehouse  the  sun, 
as  Spedding  tells  us,  did  not  display  itself  to  advan- 
tage, neither  apparently  did  Tennyson.  According  to 
his  friend  and  host  he  was  "very  gruff  and  unmanage- 
able.'" The  contrast  between  the  quietness  and 
optimism  of  FitzGerald  and  the  discontent  with  every- 
thing of  his  companion  struck  Spedding  sharply. 
After  the  departure  of  his  guests  he  wrote  to  Donne 
an  account  of  the  visit.  Tennyson,  he  said,  ''stayed 
three  weeks,  or  it  may  be  a  month,  but  the  sun  did  not 
shine  to  advantage,  and  it  must  be  a  very  capable  and 
effective  sun  that  shall  make  his  soul  rejoice  and  say, 
'Ha!  Ha!  I  am  warm.'  "-  There  was,  however,  a 
good  deal  to  account  for  the  depression  under  which 
Tennyson  with  his  peculiar  temperament  then  labored. 
During  the  whole  of  these  ten  years  of  silence  the 
future  must  have  looked  to  him  far  from  bright. 
High  appreciation  there  was  for  him  in  certain  quar- 
ters ;  but  in  general  depreciation.  It  manifestly  never 
occurred  to  him  that  this  condition  of  things  was  due 
to  his  own  neglect  to  publish  the  pieces  which  had 
excited  the  enthusiastic  admiration  of  his  comrades. 

It  is  another  proof  of  the  influence  which  Tennyson 
exerted  over  all  with  whom  he  came  in  contact  during 
the  early  days  before  his  genius  was  universally 
recognized  that  the  same  profound  impression  of  his 
superiority  which  he  had  previously  made  upon  the 
men  of  the  Cambridge  circle  who  surrounded  him,  he 

1  Hallam  Tennyson  's  '  Tennyson  and  his  Friends, '  p.  403. 

2  F.  M.  Brookfield  's  '  The  Cambridge  Apostles, '  p.  267. 


356  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

made  also  upon  FitzGerald.  The  latter  recognized  his 
new  friend 's  oddities  and  eccentricities ;  he  was  amused 
by  them.  The  poet  was  always  subject  to  fits  of 
despondency ;  but  it  was  during  the  years  immediately 
following  the  death  of  Hallam  that  the  burden  of  life 
seems  to  have  weighed  with  peculiar  heaviness  upon 
his  spirit.  The  feelings  to  which  this  gave  rise  did 
not  affect,  however,  FitzGerald 's  estimate  of  the  man. 
*'I  will  say  no  more  of  Tennyson,"  he  wrote  to  a 
friend,  ''than  that  the  more  I  have  seen  of  him,  the 
more  cause  I  have  to  think  him  great.  His  little 
humours  and  grumpinesses  were  so  droll,  that  I  was 
always  laughing:  and  was  often  put  in  mind  (strange 
to  say)  of  my  little  unknown  friend.  Undine — I  must 
however  say,  further,  that  I  felt  what  Charles  Lamb 
describes,  a  sense  of  depression  at  times  from  the 
overshadowing  of  a  so  much  more  lofty  intellect  than 
my  own:  this  (though  it  may  seem  vain  to  say  so)  I 
never  experienced  before,  though  I  have  often  been 
with  much  greater  intellects:  but  I  could  not  be  mis- 
taken in  the  universality  of  his  mind;  and  perhaps  I 
have  received  some  benefit  in  the  now  more  distinct 
consciousness  of  my  dwarfishness.'" 

1  Letter  to  John  Allen  of  May  23,  1835,  in  his  Letters  edited  by  W.  A. 
Wright,  Vol.  I,  p.  28. 


CHAPTER  XIV 

THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— SECOND  HALF 
1837-1842 

In  April,  1835,  Browning  went  to  Moxon  with  his 
poem  of  'Paracelsus.'  Him  he  sought  on  account  of 
his  good  name  and  fame  Avith  authors.  That  publisher 
had  himself  brought  out  a  volume  of  verse.  Conse- 
quently all  poets  with  reputations  to  make  either  went 
to  him  of  their  own  accord  or  were  recommended  to 
go  by  personal  friends  or  by  rival  publishers.  Nat- 
urally he  had  begun  to  grow  weary  of  dealing  in  wares 
which  so  far  from  bringing  in  profit  were  attended 
with  actual  loss.  BroT\Tiing  presented  himself  with 
a  letter  of  introduction.  No  sooner  was  the  letter  read, 
Bro^\Tiing  tells  us,  ''than  the  Moxonian  \dsage  lowered 
exceedingly  thereat — the  Moxonian  accent  grew  dolo- 
rous thereupon."  'Artevelde,'  he  assured  him,  had 
not  paid  expenses  by  thirty-odd  pounds.  "Tennyson's 
poetry  is  popular  at  Cambridge,"  he  continued.  His 
further  remark,  however,  gave  the  impression  that 
Cambridge  was  the  only  place  where  it  was  popular. 
"Of  800,"  he  said,  "which  were  printed  of  his  last, 
some  300  only  have  gone  off.  "^  Under  the  influence 
of  these  and  other  depressing  facts,  Moxon  assured 
his  visitor  that  it  was  doubtful  if  he  would  ever  again 

1  Mrs.  Orr  's  '  Life  and  Letters  of  Robert  Bro^-ning, '  Vol.  I,  p.  98. 


358  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

venture  into  a  transaction  so  unprofitable  as  the 
publication  of  poetry.  There  was  no  money  in  it  at 
all.  Accordingly  he  begged  to  decline  even  the 
inspection  of  Browning's  manuscript. 

Lapse  of  time  did  not  cause  even  the  leading  pub- 
lisher of  the  poetry  of  the  period  to  change  his  opinion. 
The  indifference  of  the  public  to  the  highest  form  of 
literature  continued  for  many  years.  As  late  as  1844 
the  future  Mrs.  Browning  wrote  to  a  friend  that  in  the 
eyes  of  all  those  who  brought  out  books,  dealing  in 
poetry  was  nothing  but  a  desperate  speculation.  A 
writer  must  have  tried  his  public  before  he  tries  the 
publisher — that  is,  before  he  expects  that  individual, 
as  a  business  man,  to  run  any  risk  for  him.  This,  too, 
was  said  after  the  success  of  the  Tennyson  volumes  of 
1842  had  been  assured.  Accordingly  we  can  get  some 
conception  of  what  must  have  been  Moxon's  feelings 
in  1835.  About  two  years  and  a  third  had  gone  by 
since  the  poems  of  1832  had  appeared,  and  only  three 
hundred  copies  had  been  sold.  No  one  in  the  book 
trade  could  afford  to  bring  out  the  epics  of  Homer  or 
the  plays  of  Shakespeare  with  such  returns  on  the 
investment.  To  the  publisher  it  meant  pecuniary  loss ; 
to  the  author  it  was  a  petty  number  upon  which  to 
base  any  claim  to  reputation.  There  is  no  question 
indeed  that  during  the  whole  period  from  1830  to 
1842 — especially  the  earlier  half  of  it — Tennyson  was 
read  by  a  comparatively  small  number  and  appreciated 
by  a  still  smaller.  Many  seem  to  have  been  unaware 
of  even  the  fact  of  his  existence.  To  the  student  of 
contemporary   critical   literature   during  this   period 


THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— SECOND  HALF    359 

there  is  nothing  more  noticeable  than  the  little  knowl- 
edge exhibited  of  him,  the  little  interest  taken  in  him 
outside  of  a  limited  circle.  Men  whose  very  names  the 
world  has  now  been  quite  content  to  forget  were  made 
subjects  of  serious  consideration  and  in  some  instances 
of  fulsome  eulogy  in  periodicals  which  then  stood 
highest  in  public  estimation.  Yet  in  these  organs  of 
public  opinion  Tennyson's  name  was  then  mentioned 
but  seldom;  in  some  of  them  it  was  not  mentioned  at 
all. 

Two  illustrations  of  his  obscurity  may  be  given,  out 
of  several  which  exist.  During  the  fourth  decade  of 
the  century  the  newly  founded  'Eraser's  Magazine' 
gave  at  intervals  an  account  of  the  men  of  letters  who 
were  more  or  less  in  the  public  eye.  Engravings  of 
them  accompanied  the  page  of  text  describing  them. 
The  two  together  constituted  what  was  called  a 
'Gallery  of  Literary  Portraits.'  Naturally  the  most 
noted  men  of  the  time — such  as  Rogers,  Moore,  Scott, 
"Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  Carlyle,  and  Campbell — found 
there  a  place.  But  necessarily  men  of  a  much  lower 
grade  of  distinction  were  included.  There  was, 
furthermore,  no  particular  partiality  displayed  in  the 
selection  made.  If  the  magazine  took  in  its  special 
friends  like  Jerdan  and  Lockhart,  it  did  not  fail  to 
extend  its  notice  to  some  of  its  pet  aversions.  Noto- 
riety seems  to  have  been  the  main  reason  for  mention- 
ing certain  authors.  With  its  usual  horse-play  it  even 
introduced  persons  who  had  no  claim  whatever  to  be 
mentioned  at  all.  In  the  list  is  no  small  number  of 
persons  of  whom  the  world  knew  little  then  and  no 


360  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

longer  remembers.  But  among  the  more  than  seventy 
men  and  women  of  whom  it  gave  an  account,  laudatory 
or  disparaging,  the  name  of  Tennyson  does  not  occur. 

This  state  of  ignorance  continued  indeed  up  to  the 
eve  of  the  appearance  of  the  edition  of  1842.  How 
little  Tennyson  was  known  even  then,  one  fact  of  no 
particular  significance  in  itself  shows  clearly.  In 
January  of  the  year  just  mentioned,  a  volume  of 
selections  from  poets  of  prominence  or  assumed 
prominence  came  out.  It  was  entitled  'Modern  Poets 
of  the  Nineteenth  Century.'  In  all  forty-three  names 
were  represented.  How  wide-embracing  and  not  over- 
particular was  the  drag-net  may  be  inferred  from  the 
fact  that  the  collection  began  mth  Gifford,  whose  verse 
was  poorer,  if  possible,  than  his  critical  judgment. 
It  ended  with  a  selection  from  the  writings  of  the 
unfortunate  Lady  Flora  Hastings.  But  the  collection 
strove  to  include  specimens  from  the  productions  of 
all  the  poets  of  the  period,  the  humblest  as  well  as  the 
highest,  who  had  any  claim  whatever  to  recognition. 
It  is  significant  of  the  gradual  growing  appreciation 
of  the  greatness  of  Keats  that  some  of  his  work  is 
given.  But  the  name  of  Tennyson  is  absent  just  as  he 
was  about  to  take  his  place  at  the  head  of  contemporary 
English  poets. 

Yet  in  spite  of  the  comparatively  little  sale  of  his 
poems  and  the  little  recognition  he  received,  the  repute 
in  which  Tennyson  was  held  was  increasing  all  these 
years  very  steadily,  even  if  very  slowly.  Besides  the 
intrinsic  value  of  a  writer's  own  work,  the  influences 
that  operate  upon  his  reputation,  either  to  enhance  it 


THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— SECOND  HALF    361 

or  to  impair  it,  are  usually  too  complex  and  manifold 
to  justify  labelling  any  particular  one  of  them  as  a 
determining  factor  in  bringing  about  the  result.  Still, 
great  weight  in  extending  Tennyson's  fame  must  be 
accorded  to  the  unhesitating  belief  in  him  and  unhesi- 
tating support  of  him  which  came  from  his  early 
associates  at  Cambridge  University.  The  brilliant 
band  which  had  there  surrounded  him,  which  had  from 
the  first  admired  him,  which  had  hailed  him  as  the 
coming  poet  when  he  had  not  yet  attained  his  majority, 
never  lost  their  faith  in  him  during  all  these  years  of 
comparative  neglect.  The  failure  of  his  works  to  sell 
did  not  abate  in  the  slightest  their  admiration  and 
enthusiasm.  Critical  weighing  in  the  scales  they 
heeded  not;  critical  disparagement  inspired  in  them 
no  other  feeling  than  contempt.  They  were  confident 
that  the  public  would  adopt  their  opinions,  if  once 
they  could  be  permitted  to  share  their  knowledge.  In 
season  and  out  of  season  they  unhesitatingly  pro- 
claimed his  greatness  as  a  poet  to  the  dwellers  in  a 
world  most  of  whom  were  unconscious  of  his  existence, 
and  many  of  those  who  knew  of  it  were  disposed  to  be 
unbelievers  and  scoffers. 

Furthermore,  the  persons  who  made  up  this  company 
of  admirers  comprised  some  of  the  choicest  spirits  of 
the  age.  Naturally  they  were  themselves  coming  more 
and  more  to  the  front.  In  the  effect  wrought  upon 
public  opinion  it  is  quality  that  counts  more  than 
numbers.  Hence,  as  time  went  on,  the  estimate  taken 
by  these  partisans  of  the  poet  could  not  be  arrogantly 
set  aside  by  the  most  pretentious  of  reviewers.     The 


362  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

influence  of  the  Cambridge  men  in  particular  extended 
to  their  successors  at  the  university.  They  kept  up 
in  that  institution  the  belief  which  they  themselves 
had  held.  The  exhibition  of  the  loyalty  to  the  poet 
there  manifested  had  from  the  beginning  irritated  at 
times  the  professional  critics  to  a  point  almost  beyond 
endurance.  There  appears  to  have  been  a  discussion 
in  some  Cambridge  society,  possibly  the  Union,  on 
the  question  whether  Tennyson  was  or  was  not  a  great 
poet.  This  took  place,  it  must  be  kept  in  mind,  before 
most  of  the  productions  were  published  by  which  he 
is  now  widely  known.  The  report  of  this  debate,  as 
we  shall  see  later,  made  Christopher  North  almost 
foam  at  the  mouth. 

There  was,  however,  a  justification  unknown  to  the 
general  public  for  this  attitude  on  the  part  of  his 
admirers.  To  many  of  his  old  associates,  if  not  to 
most  of  them,  productions  which  were  never  to  see  the 
light  till  much  later,  were  then  shown.  When  at 
Cambridge  his  intimate  friends  had  had  the  habit  of 
taking  his  latest  work  and  copying  it  out.  The  practice 
continued  during  the  whole  of  the  fourth  decade. 
During  this  period  these  productions  passed  from 
hand  to  hand  among  the  chosen  few.  The  criticism 
to  which  Tennyson  had  been  subjected  stood  in  the 
way  of  any  willingness  on  his  part  to  publish  what 
he  had  composed ;  but  it  did  not  prevent  his  composing. 
That  went  on  uninterruptedly.  Unhappily  it  went  on 
too  often  without  the  agency  of  pen  and  ink.  Tennyson 
composed  a  good  deal  without  taking  the  pains  to  write 
it  down.    He  kept  it  in  his  memory.    It  is  a  habit  which 


THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— SECOND  HALF    363 

he  seems  to  have  maintained  during  much  if  not  all 
of  his  life.  The  result  of  this  dislike  to  the  labor  of 
writing  was  that  he  lost  the  recollection  of  many  things 
in  consequence  of  his  delay  in  putting  them  on  paper. 
Once  he  composed  three  hundred  lines  concerning 
Lancelot  and  his  quest  for  the  Sangreal.  These  he 
kept  for  some  time  in  mind;  but  he  neglected  to  keep 
them  anywhere  else.  The  result  was  that  they  all 
slipped  from  his  memory  before  they  came  to  be 
written  down.^ 

Fortunately  for  him  and  for  us,  he  frequently 
deviated  from  this  practice.  The  poems  which  we 
know  to  have  been  written  and  to  be  passing  from 
hand  to  hand  in  manuscript  among  his  personal  friends 
during  the  ten  years'  silence,  make  up  no  inconsider- 
able share  of  the  second  volume  of  the  edition  of 
1842,  and  ought  to  have  been  published  long  before. 
Furthermore,  several  of  the  pieces  which  were  subse- 
quently to  form  a  part  of  *In  Memoriam'  had  already 
been  written  during  this  early  period.  The  sight  of 
such  productions  not  merely  kept  alive  but  increased 
the  reputation  of  the  poet  in  the  circle  of  his  private 
friends.  Necessarily  it  could  not  and  did  not  affect 
the  opinion  of  the  ignorant  public.  It  was  conse- 
quently inevitable  that  this  belief  in  his  greatness 
should  not  cause  any  perceptible  addition  to  the  sale 
of  his  writings.  Neither  the  volume  of  1830  nor  that 
of  1832  ever  went  into  a  second  edition.  But  as  his 
early  friends  became  themselves  more  conspicuous, 
the  influence  they  wielded  in  his  behalf  became  more 

1  'The  Journals  of  Walter  White,'  p.  151. 


364  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

and  more  perceptible.  In  truth,  it  is  manifest  that 
in  spite  of  the  comparatively  little  circulation  of  his 
works  he  was  assuming  more  and  more  a  distinct 
position  in  the  literature  of  his  time.  He  was  coming 
to  have  a  body  of  recognized  admirers  distinct  from 
his  university  associates. 

This  fact  began  at  last  to  dawn  upon  the  minds  of 
critics.  Mill's  remark  in  his  review  that  Tennyson's 
poems  were  mnning  their  way  by  slow  approaches  to 
a  reputation  the  limits  of  which  it  would  be  just  then 
hazardous  to  predict,  is  one  of  a  number  of  observa- 
tions that  show  that  the  estimation  in  which  he  was 
held  was  gradually  impressing  itself  upon  the  minds 
of  men  generally.  Accordingly  as  time  went  on, 
though  he  was  still  under  the  shadow  of  earlier  depre- 
ciation, there  was  manifested  more  and  more  of  a 
disposition  to  treat  him  with  respect.  Even  persons 
most  disposed  to  dislike  rarely  ventured  to  condemn 
unqualifiedly.  He  was  usually  classed,  to  be  sure,  even 
by  those  favorably  inclined,  with  Sterling,  Trench,  and 
Alford  of  his  own  Cambridge  set ;  or  with  such  respect- 
able veterans  as  Leigh  Hunt  or  Barry  Cornwall;  or 
even  with  such  wearisome  nonentities  as  David  Mac- 
beth Moir,  who  had  grown  up  and  flourished  under 
the  shelter  of  *  Blackwood 's  Magazine. '  Of  his  immeas- 
urable superiority  to  each  one  of  these  or  to  all  of 
them  combined  there  was  hardly  a  suspicion  enter- 
tained by  the  critics  of  the  daj^  To  maintain  that  he 
occupied  a  really  lofty  position,  that  he  gave  promise 
of  occupying  a  much  loftier  one,  would  have  struck 
almost  every  one  of  even  the  most  well-disposed  of 


THE  TEN  YEAKS'  SILENCE— SECOND  HALF    365 

reviewers  as  a  statement  too  extravagant  to  be 
admitted  to  the  columns  of  any  sanely  conducted 
periodical.  There  were  prominent  critics  whom  an 
assertion  of  this  sort  would  have  filled  with  disgust. 
That  he  was  a  ''true"  poet  was  the  most  favorable 
\T.ew.  That  he  was  a  great  poet  none  of  them  ever 
imagined.  Still,  it  is  to  be  conceded  that  his  general 
superiority  to  his  Cambridge  contemporaries  was 
admitted,  though  with  no  decided  conviction  that  this 
was  the  genuine  gospel.  From  some  it  occasionally 
met  with  dissent,  sometimes  violently,  sometimes 
mildly  expressed. 

This  state  of  mind  can  be  recognized  in  an  incidental 
reference  to  Tennyson  in  'The  Edinburgh  Review'  for 
January,  1836.  In  it  for  the  first  time  his  name  then 
appeared.  During  the  fourth  decade  that  periodical 
reviewed  and  sometimes  reviewed  favorably  poets  who 
are  now  known  only  to  the  literary  antiquarian.  It 
does  not  seem  to  have  occurred  to  its  editor  that 
Tennyson  was  worth  reviewing.  In  the  number  just 
specified  was  a  criticism  of  Alford's  'The  School  of 
the  Heart  and  Other  Poems. '  The  article  is  noticeable 
for  its  grudging  admission  of  the  slowly  growing 
prominence  of  Tennyson's  position.  The  reviewer 
conceded  that  he  was  now  the  "most  known  of  any 
of  the  young  Cambridge  poets  who  have  lately  taken 
wing."  Still,  it  was  implied,  though  not  directly 
asserted,  that  impartial  criticism  was  forced  to  point 
out  his  inferiority  to  Alford.  This  inferiority  con- 
sisted in  three  things.  Alford  had  the  ability  to  choose 
his  subjects  from  a  higher  class,  to  conceive  them  with 


366  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

greater  distinctness,  and  to  express  his  thought  with 
more  precision.  But  there  was  something  worse 
behind.  This  the  reviewer  attempted  sadly  but  man- 
fully to  show.  Tennyson,  he  said,  ''must  not  set  it 
down  to  aridity  and  moroseness,  if  persons  of  riper 
years  have  regretted  that  his  style  was  not  sufficiently 
impregnated  with  thought; — that  more  mind  was  not 
apparent  behind  his  words."  The  remarks  of  the 
reviewer  were  manifestly  those  of  one  worthy  of 
consideration ;  for  when  it  came  to  the  display  of  lack 
of  mind,  his  article  was  throughout  the  work  of  an 
expert. 

The  publication  in  1836  of  'St.  Agnes'  in  'The  Keep- 
sake' for  1837,  and  of  the  'Stanzas'  in  'The  Tribute' 
of  the  latter  year,  awakened  intense  enthusiasm  in  the 
admirers  of  the  poet.  Scant  attention,  however,  com- 
paratively speaking,  was  paid  to  them  by  the  large 
majority  of  the  most  prominent  critical  journals  of 
the  day.  In  the  few  instances  in  which  they  were 
mentioned,  there  is  nothing  more  noticeable  than  the 
cautious  attitude  assumed  by  the  reviewer  about 
committing  himself  to  unqualified  laudation.  Yet  it 
is  evident  that  both  of  these  poems  made  a  profound 
impression  upon  many  who  had  hitherto  been  indif- 
ferent or  hostile  to  the  poet.  The  critic  of  'The 
Athenaeum'^  was  so  struck  by  the  'St.  Agnes'  that  in 
his  notice  of  the  Annual  in  which  it  appeared  he 
printed  it  entire.  He  felt  it,  however,  incumbent  upon 
him  to  apologize  for  his  admiration.  Though  the  paper 
was  pressed  for  space,  he  wrote,  "we  must,  however, 

1 '  Athenaeum, '  November  5,  1836,  p.  783. 


THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— SECOND  HALF    367 

find  room  for  a  poem,  by  Mr.  Alfred  Tennyson,  which, 
though  it  has  much  of  the  right  convent  spirit  about 
it,  is  withal  so  perversely  fantastic,  that  we  extract 
it  as  much  for  its  curiosity  as  its  beauty."  This  criti- 
cism is  extracted  here  not  for  its  sense  but  for  its 
curiosity.  If  there  be  any  one  epithet  utterly  inappro- 
priate to  the  poem  in  question,  it  is  that  of  fantastic. 
No  more  in  Tennyson's  'St.  Agnes'  than  in  that  of 
Keats 's  is  there  the  least  direct  allusion  to  the  particu- 
lar tale  of  fiction  which  does  duty  for  the  life  of  St. 
Agnes.  The  poem  of  Keats  culminates  in  the  flight  of 
the  heroine  with  the  man  she  loves.  In  Tennyson's 
poem  no  feelings  of  this  nature  fill  the  heart  of  the 
maiden.  No  thought  of  earthly  love  is  there  suggested. 
Instead  is  depicted  the  aspiration  of  a  saintly  spirit 
that  longs  to  be  the  bride  of  heaven,  her  eagerness  to 
pass  from  a  world  of  sin  and  sorrow  to  the  purity  of 
the  celestial  life.  At  the  very  beginning  of  the  poem 
the  maiden  is  represented  as  looking  forward  from  the 
chill  confines  of  her  convent  home  to  the  habitation  on 
high  to  become  fit  for  which  is  her  sole  desire.  At  the 
very  end  is  represented  the  ecstatic  vision  of  the 
purified  soul  freed  from  the  incumbrance  of  the  flesh, 
and  about  to  form  an  eternal  union  -with  the  heavenly 
bridegroom.  How  perfect  is  the  portrayal  of  the 
thoughts  and  feelings  of  the  white-robed  vestal,  in 
whom  the  spiritual  life  has  eradicated  all  soil  of  sense, 
no  one  needs  now  to  be  told.  The  epithet  of  fantastic 
could  be  applied  to  the  poem  only  by  one  who  had  no 
comprehension  of  its  inner  meaning. 

There  is  more  excuse  for  the  attitude  assumed  by 


368  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

the  writer  of  the  article  on  'The  Tribute'  which 
appeared  in  'The  Edinburgh  Eeview'  for  October, 
1837.  The  poem  of  Tennyson  contained  in  it,  picturing 
as  it  does  the  hallucination  of  the  lover  who  has  lost 
his  bride,  does  not  reveal  its  meaning  after  hasty- 
reading.  This  is  usually  all  that  the  hard-pressed 
critic  is  able  to  give.  But  in  this  instance,  though  he 
could  not  fully  understand,  he  could  in  a  measure 
appreciate.  The  beauty  of  the  lines  impressed  him. 
In  his  article  occurs  the  second  of  the  two  mentions 
of  Tennyson  which  are  found  in  that  stately  periodical 
before  the  publication  of  the  edition  of  1842.  The  first 
had  found  him  lacking  in  thought.  The  second  was  to 
find  him  mysterious  and  obscure.  Still,  on  the  strength 
of  the  'Stanzas'  appearing  in  'The  Tribute,'  the 
reviewer  had  got  so  far  along  as  to  be  able  to  recognize 
Tennyson  as  a  "true"  poet.  In  this  notice  of  'The 
Tribute'  we  are  told  that  it  contains  "a  great  deal  of 
pleasing  poetry"  without  "exhibiting  any  one  speci- 
men of  very  marked  genius  or  striking  originality." 
There  were  quoted  several  of  these  "pleasing"  pieces 
which  are  as  little  worth  reading  now  as  they  were 
worth  reading  then.  It  ended,  however,  with  citing  a 
number  of  lines — fifty-eight  in  all — from  the  one  poem 
which  gives  all  the  value  it  now  possesses  to  the 
volume  containing  it.  "We  do  not  profess  perfectly 
to  understand,"  said  the  reviewer,  "the  somewhat 
mysterious  contribution  of  Mr.  Alfred  Tennyson, 
entitled  'Stanzas';  but  amidst  some  quaintness,  and 
some  occasional  absurdities  of  expression,  it  is  not 


THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— SECOND  HALF    369 

difficult  to  detect  the  hand  of  a  true  poet.'"  The 
occasional  absurdities  the  critic  unfortunately  kept  to 
himself ;  no  one  since  has  been  able  to  discover  them. 

But  perhaps  the  most  significant  testimony  to  the 
growth  of  Tennyson's  reputation  is  the  fact  that  in 
the  latter  part  of  this  fourth  decade  he  was  beginning 
to  have  imitators.  Most  of  the  productions  of  this 
nature  have  disappeared  from  the  memory  of  all  men 
if  they  ever  fixed  themselves  at  all  upon  the  minds 
of  any.  The  existence  of  some  of  these  asserted 
imitations  was  doubtless  due  to  the  fancy  of  the  critic. 
Of  this  there  is  one  noticeable  instance.  In  the  middle 
of  1836,  the  editorship  of  'The  Monthly  Repository'— 
which  there  has  been  more  than  one  occasion  to  men- 
tion— passed  from  Fox  to  Richard  Hengist  Home. 
After  holding  it  for  a  year,  he  was  succeeded  in  the 
position  by  Leigh  Hunt.  Under  him  the  periodical 
maintained  for  some  months  a  lingering  life  but  at 
last  gave  up  the  ghost.  To  the  first  number  that  came 
out  under  his  charge — that  for  July,  1837 — he  con- 
tributed a  poem  called  'Blue-Stocking  Revels,  or  the 
Feast  of  the  Violets.'  In  the  second  of  its  three 
cantos,  entitled  'The  Presentation  Ball,'  came  an 
account  in  alphabetical  order  of  all  the  female  writers 
of  the  day.  In  it  the  future  Mrs.  Browning  was 
described  in  the  following  words : 

A  young  lady  then,  whom  to  miss  were  a  caret 
In  any  verse-history,  named,  I  think,  Barrett, 
(I  took  her  at  first  for  a  sister  of  Tennyson) 
Knelt,  and  received  the  god's  kindliest  benison. 
1  Vol.  LXVI,  p.  103. 


370  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

"Truly,"  said  he,  "dost  thou  share  the  blest  power 

Poetic,  the  fragrance  as  well  as  the  flower, 

The  gift  of  conveying  impressions  unseen, 

And  making  the  vaguest  thoughts  know  what  they  mean. 

Only  pray  have  a  care,  nor  let  Alfred  beguile 

Admiration  too  far  into  manner  and  style ; 

Nor  divide  with  the  printer  your  claims  to  be  read, 

By  directing  our  faculties  when  to  say  ed. 

Such  anxieties  do  both  your  geniuses  wrong; 

Tend  to  make  things  too  verbal,  the  mind  not  so  strong ; 

And  besides,  my  dear,  who  has  not  read  an  old  song. 

The  matter  of  the  whole  poem  is  poor ;  the  expression 
of  it  is  worse ;  the  asserted  charge  of  imitation  is  worst. 
Miss  Barrett  naturally  felt  surprise  and  annoyance, 
and  would  have  been  justified  in  expressing  resent- 
ment. Yet  this  same  ridiculous  charge  of  imitating 
Tennyson  had  been  made  before  and  continued  to  be 
made  afterward.  Some  time  after,  she  gave  vent  to  her 
feelings  of  vexation  at  this  utterly  baseless  charge  in 
an  undated  letter,  but  pretty  certainly  belonging  to 
1842  or  1843.  ''As  to  Tennyson,"  she  wrote,  **his 
admirer  I  am,  and  his  imitator  I  am  not  as  certainly. 
Nearly  everything  in  'The  Seraphim'  was  written 
before  I  ever  read  one  of  his  then  published  volumes ; 
and  even  the  'instructing  the  reader  to  say  ed'  was 
done  on  the  pattern  of  Campbell's  'Theodoric,'  and 
not  from  a  later  example."^ 

Peculiar  critical  obtuseness  it  required  to  charge 
Miss  Barrett  mth  being  an  imitator  of  Tennyson. 
Still,  in  that  early  period  when  the  poet  himself  had 

1 '  Contemporary  Eeview, '  Vol.  XXIII,  p.  454. 


THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— SECOND  HALF    371 

but  little  public  recognition,  there  are  testimonies 
sufficient  to  show  that  in  the  eyes  of  the  men  of  the 
time  a  school  of  writers  were  consciously  or  uncon- 
sciously forming  themselves  upon  him  and  adopting 
his  manner  and  method.  That  surely  was  the  opinion 
of  critics.  We  may  throw  aside  the  testimony  found 
in  a  review  of  the  poems  of  John  Clare  which  appeared 
in  'Blackwood's  Magazine'  for  August,  1835.  In  it 
mention  is  made  of  ' '  the  inferior  followers  of  Shelley, 
Keates,  Hunt,  and  Tennysson."  The  remark  carries 
little  weight  because  it  is  manifest  that  the  writer  of 
the  article  was  not  too  well  acquainted  with  the  better- 
known  men  of  whom  he  was  talking.  There  is  far 
stronger  evidence  of  the  existence  of  a  condition  of 
things  still  little  recognized  by  even  well-read  students 
of  the  poet  and  of  the  period.  In  October,  1838,  Henry 
Taylor  was  engaged  in  correspondence  with  a  young 
Oxford  student  who  had  consulted  him  about  his 
career.  The  latter,  in  seeking  for  advice,  had  sent 
him  some  verses  of  his  own  composition.  These 
Taylor  of  course  told  him  had  been  read  with  much 
pleasure.  That  is  something  which  the  sender  of 
verses  is  always  told,  if  told  anything  at  all.  In  this 
instance  the  assertion  appears  to  have  been  sincere. 
''I  should  like  to  know  something,"  wrote  Taylor, 
**of  your  English  poetical  reading,  whether  it  lies 
amongst  the  poets  of  the  seventeenth  century,  or 
amongst  the  moderns,  whether  mth  those  Miisas 
severiores  qui  colunt,  or  with  the  lighter  authors. 
Your  'Poet's  Dirge'  seems  to  savour  a  little  of  such 
reading  as  Fletcher's  'Faithful  Shepherdess'  in  the 


372  LIFE  AND  TBIES  OF  TENNYSON 

better  time  of  English  poetry,  or  perhaps  of  Tennyson 
in  the  present  day." 

This  is  one  of  several  indications  that  Tennyson's 
influence  was  not  only  beginning  to  be  felt  but  also  to 
be  recognized.  Far  more  marked  is  the  involuntary 
tribute  paid  about  this  time  to  the  slowly  increasing 
appreciation  of  his  poetry  in  an  incidental  reference 
to  him  by  his  ancient  detractor,  'The  Quarterly 
Re\dew.'  It  is  found  in  the  number  for  June,  1839. 
It  occurs  in  a  criticism  of  the  volume  entitled  'Poems 
of  Many  Years,'  by  Richard  Monckton  Milnes.  This 
work  had  come  out  in  1838.  Were  internal  evidence 
of  much  value,  one  would  say  that  the  review  must 
have  been  the  work  of  John  Wilson  Croker.^  The 
sentiments  expressed  were  certainly  his  sentiments. 
The  attitude  towards  Milnes  was  partly  favorable, 
partly  unfavorable ;  but  it  inclined  more  to  the  former 
than  to  the  latter.  A  good  deal  of  hope  was  expressed 
for  his  future.  His  volume,  with  all  its  faults,  con- 
tained in  the  critic's  opinion  better  English  verse  than 
had  yet  been  published  by  any  living  writer,  not  yet 
on  the  wrong  side  of  the  mezzo  del  cammin.  The 
'Edinburgh'  had  inferentially,  as  we  have  seen,  placed 
Alford  above  Tennyson.  The  'Quarterly'  unhesi- 
tatingly placed  Mines  higher. 

But  the  critic  in  the  course  of  his  article  pointed  out 
one    danger    which    beset    the    author.      Milnes,    he 

1  The  assertion  has  several  times  been  made  that  this  review  was  the 
work  of  Kinglake.  In  'The  Cambridge  Apostles'  (p.  237),  it  is  declared 
further  that  Milnes  was  aware  of  the  fact.  The  article,  however,  bears 
no  possible  resemblance  to  Kinglake 's  style,  and  certainly  conflicts  with 
the  opinions  he  expressed  later. 


THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— SECOND  HALF    373 

asserted,  was  meant  by  nature  to  be  a  poet.  If  he 
ultimately  failed  to  secure  the  station  to  which  he  was 
entitled,  he  would  have  nothing  to  blame  but  his  per- 
verse admiration  for  absurd  models.  One  is  naturally 
curious  to  know  who  these  absurd  models  were  that 
had  harmfully  kindled  mistaken  admiration.  In 
another  part  of  his  article  the  critic  gives  us  to 
understand  who  at  least  two  of  them  were.  ''We  are 
quite  sure,"  he  wrote,  ''that  he  [Milnes]  will  here- 
after obey  one  good  precept  in  an  otherwise  doubtful 
decalogue — 

'Thou  shalt  believe  in  Milton,  Dryden,  Pope;' 

and  regret  few  sins  of  his  youth  more  bitterly  than 
the  homage  he  has  now  rendered  at  the  fantastic 
shrines  of  such  baby  idols  as  Mr.  John  Keats  and 
Mr.  Alfred  Tennyson."  In  this  disparaging  opinion 
the  'Quarterly'  was  joined  at  this  very  time  by  the 
'Edinburgh.'  In  a  review  of  the  poetical  works  of 
Shelley  which  appeared  in  the  latter  periodical  in  July, 
1839,^  there  occurs  a  reference  to  ' '  the  unbearable  cox- 
combry of  the  'intense'  and  mystic  school  of  versifiers 
who  made  him  their  model — including  both  the  Shellites 
of  the  old  connexion,  and  those  of  the  new,  or  Tenny- 
sonites. "  In  these  two  extracts  we  find  expressed  the 
dying  throes  of  a  criticism,  which  after  vaunting  itself 
exceedingly  for  a  decade,  hardly  ventured  a  few  years 
later  to  put  forth  its  face;  or  if  it  did,  was  either 
contemptuously  spurned  or  was  too  much  despised 
to  be  even  noticed. 

1  Vol.  LXIX,  p.  510. 


374  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

To  go  back  to  the  private  life  of  Tennyson  during 
the  second  half  of  this  ten  years'  period  of  silence. 
After  their  departure  from  Somersby  in  1837,  the 
family  took  up  their  residence  at  High  Beech  in  Epping 
Forest.  There  for  about  three  years  they  remained. 
As  might  be  inferred  from  the  name,  the  place  was 
one  of  the  highest  points  in  the  Forest.  It  was  covered 
with  magnificent  beech  trees  and  is  also  in  close 
proximity  to  Waltham  Abbey,  whose  bells  are 
said  to  have  inspired  the  Christmas  canticle  of  'In 
Memoriam. '  The  nearness  of  the  new  home  to  London 
enabled  Tennyson  to  come  into  frequent  contact  with 
his  old  associates.  It  was  the  evening  journey  between 
his  residence  and  the  city  which  suggested  to  him  the 
couplet  of  '  Locksley  Hall ' : 

And  at  night  along  the  dusky  highway  near  and  nearer 

drawn, 
Sees  in  heaven  the  light  of  London  flaring  like  a  dreary 

dawn. 

He  was  natural  y  a  frequent  visitor  to  his  intimate 
friend  and  unwa  veering  admirer  Spedding  at  his  law- 
chambers  in  Lir coin's  Inn.  He  became  one  of  the 
members  of  the  club  meeting  on  Tuesday,  established 
in  1838,  which  speedily  took  the  name  of  its  founder 
Sterling.  There  he  inevitably  saw  many  of  his  old 
friends  and  fellow  students;  for  fully  half  of  the 
original  members  had  belonged  to  the  Cambridge 
Apostles.  It  was  for  him  in  all  probability  a  nominal 
membership  rather  than  an  active  one.     For  much 


THE  TEN  YEAKS'  SILENCE— SECOND  HALF   375 

participation  in  the  debates  his  shyness  would  stand 
in  the  way. 

In  1840  the  family  removed  to  Tunbridge  Wells  in 
Kent.  Thither  they  had  been  ordered  by  a  London 
physician,  who  said  it  was  the  only  place  in  England 
for  persons  with  their  constitutions.  It  turned  out  an 
unfortunate  choice.  The  house  chosen  was  too  small 
for  comfort.  The  place  itself  was  in  Tennyson's  eyes 
an  abomination.  According  to  his  statement,  it  was 
not  long  before  they  were  half -killed  by  the  tenuity  of 
the  atmosphere  and  the  presence  of  steel  more  or  less 
in  earth,  air,  and  water.  There  is  nothing  peculiar 
in  this  particular  belief.  Most  of  us  are  disposed  to 
find  detrimental  to  health  the  air  of  any  place  where 
we  do  not  care  to  dwell.  With  these  feelings  about 
Tunbridge,  whether  well  founded  or  more  likely  purely 
imaginary,  it  was  naturally  not  a  spot  where  they 
cared  to  remain  permanently.  In  the  autumn  of  1841, 
the  family  removed  to  Boxley  near  Maidstone.  One 
main  reason  for  the  choice  of  this  ne  v  abode  was  its 
proximity  to  Park  House,  the  home  of  the  Lushingtons, 
one  of  whom  married  the  follomng  ;ear  a  sister  of 
the  poet.  In  all  these  changes  of  residence  while 
Tennyson  remained  regularly  with  the  family,  he  made 
frequent  excursions  over  the  country,  though  doubtless 
far  fewer  than  he  desired.  Through  all  his  early 
career  there  are  references  in  the  correspondence  of 
the  period  to  his  changing  plans,  to  his  scheme  of 
going  somewhere,  he  hardly  knew  where,  and  ending 
up  ^\ith  going  nowhere,  like  many  of  us  who  start  out 
with  the  idea  of  visiting  the  ends  of  the  earth  but 


376  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

consider  ourselves  at  last  fortunate  if  we  can  succeed 
in  getting  into  the  nearest  country  and  sometimes  into 
the  next  county. 

More  than  once  Tennyson  is  represented  as  planning 
a  trip  to  some  place  of  importance  and  finally  landing 
in  some  place  which  no  one  had  ever  heard  of,  or  if 
heard  of,  had  never  cared  to  see.  The  failure  of  many 
of  these  projected  trips  was  in  all  probability  due  not 
so  much  to  change  of  intention  as  to  lack  of  means. 
In  an  undated  letter  belonging  somewhere  in  this 
period,  Spedding  referred  to  the  uncertain  movements 
of  his  friend.  "Alfred  Tennyson,"  he  wrote,  "has 
reappeared,  and  is  going  to-day  or  to-morrow  to 
Florence,  or  to  Killarney,  or  to  Madeira,  or  to  some 
place  where  some  ship  is  going — he  does  not  know 
where.  He  has  been  on  a  visit  to  a  madhouse  (not  as 
a  patient),  and  has  been  delighted  with  the  mad  people, 
whom  he  reports  as  the  most  agreeable  and  the  most 
reasonable  persons  he  has  met  with.  The  keeper  is 
Dr.  Allen  .  .  .  with  whom  he  has  been  greatly  taken. ' ' 
If  this  be  the  Dr.  Allen  who  subsequently  induced  him 
to  engage  in  a  speculative  enterprise,  he  had  ample 
reason  to  regret  his  visit  to  the  madhouse,  in  the 
pecuniary  trouble  and  mental  distress  which  beset 
him  in  the  early  forties. 

It  must  not,  however,  be  fancied  that  aimless 
wandering  characterized  at  any  time  the  life  of  Tenny- 
son. He  was  in  truth  one  of  the  hardest  of  students, 
and  systematically  devoted  himself  to  the  acquisition 
of  knowledge  in  many  different  fields.  Several  of 
these  might  be  considered  as  lying  outside  the  peculiar 


THE  TEN  YEARS'  SILENCE— SECOND  HALF    377 

province  of  a  poet.  He  not  merely  learned  modern 
languages  and  made  himself  familiar  with  their  litera- 
tures, but  he  devoted  time  and  attention  to  the  study 
of  the  natural  sciences.  To  botany,  geology,  and 
astronomy  he  paid  special  attention  both  then  and 
in  later  life.  But  as  is  to  be  expected,  while  we  hear 
of  his  journeys  or  intended  journeys  in  the  corre- 
spondence of  the  period,  little  reference  is  made  to  the 
studies  he  was  pursuing  while  at  home,  whether  it  was 
at  Somersby  or  High  Beech,  or  at  Boxley,  where  the 
family  remained  for  a  while  before  their  removal  to 
Cheltenham.  It  was  while  residing  at  Boxley  that 
Tennyson  broke  finally  the  silence  of  years  by  once 
more  appearing  in  print.  As  the  publication  of  the 
poems  of  1842  marks  the  turning-point  in  his  career, 
it  demands  fulness  of  consideration  of  the  circum- 
stances attending  its  production  as  well  as  of  the 
nature  of  its  reception  by  the  public.  It  demands  it 
all  the  more  because  erroneous  statements  have  been 
made  and  still  continue  to  be  occasionally  made  upon 
both  these  points. 


CHAPTER  XV 
THE  POEMS  OF  1842 

As  the  fifth  decade  of  the  century  opened,  the  inti- 
mate personal  friends  of  Tennyson  had  become  some- 
what impatient  to  have  him  appear  once  more  in 
print.  Their  faith  in  him,  fed  as  it  was  by  the  perusal 
of  unpublished  poems,  had  steadily  waxed  more 
intense.  Those  permitted  to  read  these  productions 
deplored  his  continued  silence.  Outside  too  of  his 
associates  there  were  plenty  of  men  ready  to  encour- 
age him  who  stood  far  higher  in  ability  than  any  single 
one  of  his  detractors.  Walter  Savage  Landor  heard 
read  from  manuscript  in  December,  1837,  the  poem 
of  'The  Passing  of  Arthur,'  which  when  published 
appeared  under  the  title  of  'Morte  d 'Arthur.'  In  a 
letter  of  that  year  he  said  of  it  that  ''it  is  more 
Homeric  than  any  poem  of  our  time,  and  rivals  some 
of  the  noblest  parts  of  the  Odyssea."^ 

But  no  suggestions,  no  entreaties  of  any  sort  could 
induce  Tennyson  to  publish.  At  the  bottom  of  this 
decision  was  mainly  his  excessive  sensitiveness  to 
criticism  and  the  rough  treatment  to  which  his  previous 
volume  had  been  subjected.  In  addition  to  this  he 
shared   in   the   general   belief   that   the    times   were 

1  John  Forster  's  '  Walter  Savage  Landor, '  1869,  p.  509. 


THE  POEMS  OF  1842  379 

unpropitious  to  the  publication  of  poetry.  There  was 
no  sale  for  it,  at  least  for  that  kind  of  it  which  was 
of  a  high  grade.  There  was  accordingly  little  induce- 
ment for  the  author  to  submit  himself  to  the  tender 
mercies  of  a  public  which  did  not  care  to  read  what 
he  wrote,  or  if  by  any  chance  it  did  read,  was  inclined 
to  judge  it  harshly.  There  was  nothing  peculiar  to 
Tennyson  himself  in  this  state  of  mind  beyond  the 
intensity  of  the  feeling  with  which  he  held  it.  All  the 
writers  of  that  period  shared  in  it  more  or  less. 
Milnes,  for  example,  wrote  in  March,  1837,  to  Aubrey 
de  Vere  of  the  hesitation  he  felt  about  publishing  his 
poems.  He  was  not  at  all  disposed  to  bring  them  out 
till  he  had  made  them  as  perfect  as  lay  in  his  power. 
' '  I  am  too  old, ' '  he  said,  ' '  to  produce  them  as  youthful 
exercises,  so  that  they  will  have  to  come  forward  on 
their  own  merits  without  excuse  or  veil;  hence  the 
assiduous  correction  of  them  by  judgment  and  expe- 
rience is  imperative ;  and  when  the  world  is  such  that 
Alfred  Tennyson  does  not  think  it  worth  while  to 
write  down  his  compositions,  there  need  be  no  rash 
eagerness  on  my  part.  "^  In  a  later  letter  to  the  same 
friend  he  referred  again  to  this  characteristic  of  the 
poet.  ^'Tennyson,"  he  wrote,  ''composes  every  day, 
but  nothing  will  persuade  him  to  print,  or  even  write 
it  down."^ 

The  pressure  upon  him  to  publish  became  more 
insistent  after  the  appearance  of  the  two  poems  which 
came  out  in  ' The  Keepsake '  and  ' The  Tribute. '    "Do 

I'Life  and  Letters  of  Richard  Monckton  Milnes,'  Vol.  I,  p.  194. 
2  Ibid.,  Vol.  I,  p.  220. 


380  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

you  ever  see  Tennyson,"  wrote  Trench  to  Milnes  in 
March,  1838,  *'and  if  so,  could  you  not  urge  him  to 
take  the  field  I  I  think  with  the  exception  of  myself 
and  him,  everybody  sent  to  'The  Tribute'  the  poorest, 
or  nearly  the  poorest,  things  they  had  by  them.  But 
I  suppose  that  as  it  was  only  for  a  charity,  it  did  not 
much  signify.  His  poem  was  magnificent."^  These 
observations  could  hardly  have  been  altogether  grati- 
fying to  Trench's  correspondent,  who  had  himself 
been  largely  instrumental  in  procuring  pieces  for  the 
collection.  In  it,  too,  four  of  his  own  had  appeared. 
Still  the  correctness  of  the  criticism  no  one  is  now 
likely  to  question.  But  the  urgent  appeal  of  Trench, 
if  it  ever  reached  Tennyson,  had  no  effect  upon  his 
resolution.  Feeble  as  we  now  know  were  the  real 
reasons  for  his  silence,  there  was  in  his  own  mind 
what  would  appear  a  plausible  justification  for  his 
course.  He  was  well  aware  that  he  was  little  regarded 
outside  of  a  comparatively  small  circle.  Though  this 
circle  had  been  steadily  enlarging,  nevertheless  it  still 
remained  small.  Most  of  the  men  of  the  English- 
speaking  world  had  never  heard  of  him ;  most  of  those 
who  had  heard,  had  been  content  to  accept  the  con- 
temptuous estimate  expressed  of  him  years  before  by 
'The  Quarterly  Review.'  His  two  published  pieces, 
so  warmly  admired  by  those  who  read  them,  were  read 
after  all  by  a  far  from  large  number.  For  men 
generally  they  were  largely  lost  to  sight  in  the  jungle 
of  poetical  weeds  by  which  they  were  surrounded. 
Nor  even  in  the  circle  of  his  immediate  friends  had  the 

1  R.  M.  Milnes 's  'Life  and  Letters,'  Vol.  I,  p.  208. 


THE  POEMS  OF  1842  381 

first  of  these  two  contributions  met  always  with  warm 
recognition.  The  poem  of  'St.  Agnes,'  Sterling  was 
not  disposed  to  admire.  ''I  had  heard  much  more  of 
it,"  he  wrote  to  Trench,  ''than  I  think  it  deserves. 
The  great  merit,  as  usual  with  him,  is  his  eye  for  the 
picturesque.  An  iced  saint  is  certainly  much  better 
than  an  iced  cream,  but  not  much  better  than  a  frosted 
tree.  The  original  Agnes  is  worth  twenty  of  her.'" 
It  is  clear  from  this  very  shallow  comment,  in  which 
a  comparison  is  made  between  Tennyson's  poem  and 
the  totally  dissimilar  one  of  Keats,  that  Sterling  had 
no  comprehension  of  the  piece  or  of  what  it  was 
intended  to  illustrate.  His  remarks  are  only  of 
importance  because  they  show  that  his  attention  had 
been  called  to  it  by  the  impression  which  it  had  made 
upon  others  and  by  the  admiration  which  it  had  excited. 
It  was  not  unnatural  therefore  that  Tennyson  should 
remain  unconvinced  of  the  desirability  of  publication. 
However  much  personal  friends  might  exalt  him,  he 
was  well  aware  that  he  was  really  but  little  known. 
There  was  clearly  no  eagerness  on  the  part  of  the 
general  public  to  read  what  he  had  already  published. 
What  evidence  was  there  that  they  would  welcome 
what  he  might  further  choose  to  publish?  During  the 
years  which  had  gone  by  since  his  two  ventures,  there 
was  not  sufficient  demand  for  his  poetry — at  least  the 
demand  was  not  urgent  enough — to  render  it  advisable 
to  bring  out  a  second  edition  of  either  volume.  In  this 
respect  his  fortunes  may  be  said  to  resemble  those 
of  Keats.     What  was  true  of  his  poetic  predecessor 

1  E.  C.  Trench 's  '  Letters  and  Memorials, '  Vol.  I,  p.  220. 


382  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

was  to  some  extent  true  of  himself.  It  is  right  to  add 
also  that  the  admirers  of  the  one  were  largely  the 
admirers  of  the  other.  Indeed  the  resemblance  of  the 
two  men  in  their  fortunes  was  indicated  in  a  letter 
written  in  September,  1841,  by  the  same  John  Sterling 
who  had  been  dissatisfied  with  the  poem  in  '  The  Keep- 
sake.'  ''Lately,"  he  wrote  to  Trench,  "I  have  been 
reading  again  some  of  Alfred  Tennyson's  second 
volume,  and  with  profound  admiration  of  his  truly 
lyric  and  idyllic  genius.  There  seems  to  me  to  have 
been  more  epic  power  in  Keats — that  fiery,  beautiful 
meteor.  But  they  are  two  most  true  and  great  poets. 
When  one  thinks  of  the  amount  of  recognition  they 
have  received,  one  may  well  bless  God  that  poetry  is 
in  itself  strength  and  joy,  whether  it  be  crowned  by 
all  mankind  or  left  alone  in  its  own  magic  hermitage. '  * 
These  words  might  fairly  be  taken  as  justifying  the 
resolution  of  Tennyson  not  to  appear.  They  certainly 
convey  the  impression  that  the  public  as  a  whole  was 
indifferent  to  the  merits  of  both  himself  and  of  Keats, 
or  rather  ignorant  of  their  existence.  In  truth  the 
little  sale  of  their  works  was  later  given  as  having 
had  the  effect  of  increasing  their  reputation.  This 
extraordinary  view  was  taken  in  a  criticism  of  the 
volumes  of  1842  which  was  as  hostile  as  it  dared  to 
be.  ''Until  only  very  recently,"  remarked  'The 
Literary  Gazette,'  "it  was  difficult  to  obtain  either  the 
poems  by  John  Keats  or  Alfred  Tennyson;  and  the 
scarcity  of  their  works  has  been  the  means  of  adding 
greatly  to  the  reputation  of  the  authors ;  they  have 
been  more  inquired  after  than  read,  and  their  names 


THE  POEMS  OF  1842  383 

better  known  than  their  poems.  "^  The  profound  dis- 
covery that  the  inability  to  secure  an  author's  works 
contributes  to  the  spread  of  his  fame  could  have  come 
only  from  the  editor  of  the  journal  in  which  the  criti- 
cism appeared.  It  bears  the  stamp  of  Jerdan  himself. 
There  is  no  doubt,  however,  that  at  the  beginning 
of  the  fifth  decade  of  the  century,  it  was  coming  to 
be  difficult  to  procure  Tennyson 's  poems.  The  number 
of  copies  printed  had  not  been  large  in  the  first 
instance.  During  the  years  which  had  passed  this 
number  had  been  well-nigh  exhausted.  Yet  it  is 
doubtful  if  the  scarcity  of  the  volumes,  combined  mth 
the  urgency  of  friends  and  admirers,  would  have  been 
of  avail  to  break  the  poet's  policy  of  silence,  had  not 
another  agency  now  come  forward  to  force  him  to 
action.  Pressure  for  publication  showed  itself  from 
a  quarter  he  could  hardly  have  anticipated.  The 
information  was  conveyed  to  him  in  1841  that  his 
poems  were  to  be  reprinted  in  America.  That  project 
was  not  entirely  new.  As  far  back  as  January,  1838, 
a  highly  appreciative  notice  of  his  writings  had 
appeared  at  Boston  in  'The  Christian  Examiner.' 
This  was  a  quarterly  re\dew  ^vith  then  a  good  deal 
of  reputation  as  the  organ  of  the  Unitarian  body. 
The  author  of  the  article  was  John  Sullivan  Dwight, 
originally  a  clergyman,  subsequently  a  member  of  the 
Brook  Farm  community,  and  later  known  as  a  musical 
critic  of  authority.  It  may  have  been  in  consequence 
of  this  review  that  a  reprint  in  this  country  of  Tenny- 
son's two  volumes  came  to  be  under  consideration  that 

1' Literary  Gazette'  for  November  19,  1842,  p.  788. 


384  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

same  year.  Whether  due  to  the  disinclination  of  the 
publisher  on  second  thought  to  risk  the  venture,  or  to 
the  remonstrance  of  Tennyson  himself,  the  under- 
taking, if  seriously  contemplated,  was  not  carried  out 
at  that  time.  But  in  this  instance  it  was  evident  from 
the  communication  sent  that  there  was  to  be  no  falter- 
ing. The  news  was  hardly  agreeable.  There  was  a 
pretty  large  number  of  his  earlier  pieces  which  Tenny- 
son had  no  desire  to  have  brought  again  to  the 
attention  of  the  public.  The  faults  in  many  of  them 
and  the  futility  of  some  of  them  he  had  long  before 
come  to  see  more  clearly  than  the  most  venomous  of 
his  critics.  Naturally  the  prospect  of  their  reappear- 
ance did  not  please  him.    But  what  could  he  do  ? 

It  is  a  proof  of  the  steady  advance  which  had  been 
silently  going  on  in  Tennyson's  reputation  that  trans- 
atlantic eyes  had  for  some  time  begun  to  look  upon  his 
poems  as  fit  subjects  for  reprint.  Even  in  England 
the  number  of  copies  issued  were  showing  themselves 
inadequate  to  meet  the  demand,  slowly  growing  as  it 
had  been.  Mrs.  Browning  tells  us  in  a  letter  of 
September,  1842,  that  though  she  had  the  volume  of 
1832,  she  had  been  unable  to  procure  that  of  1830, 
having  inquired  for  it  vainly.^  But  if  his  poems  were 
becoming  scarce  in  England,  it  was  practically  impos- 
sible to  procure  them  in  America.  His  admirers  in 
this  country,  whatever  their  number,  were  no  longer 
disposed  to  rest  content  with  copies  of  single  pieces 
or  with  fragmentary  extracts.  Hence  came  from  them 
this  ominous  reminder  of  what  was  in  store  for  him, 

1' Letters  of  Elizabeth  Barrett  Bro^iiing,'  Vol.  I,  p.  109. 


THE  POEMS  OF  1842  385 

if  he  neglected  any  longer  to  make  a  renewed  appear- 
ance before  the  public.  The  pressure  was  of  a  kind 
against  which  he  could  make  no  effective  resistance. 
The  land  of  the  free,  as  he  complained,  felt  itself  free 
to  help  itself  to  his  writings,  and  to  reprint  them  for 
him,  if  he  were  indisposed  to  take  that  course  on  his 
own  responsibility.  For  it  was  distinctly,  though 
delicately,  intimated  that  if  he  himself  took  no  action, 
action  would  be  taken  for  him. 

So  much  has  been  said  and  justly  said  against  the 
book-pirate,  and  of  the  wrongs  inflicted  by  him  upon 
authors,  that  it  is  well  to  put  on  record  the  few  services 
to  literature  which  he  has  rendered.  He  occasionally 
took  the  place  of  posterity  and  did  its  work.  The 
pressure  he  put  upon  the  reluctant  writer  has  been 
sometimes  beneficial.  It  was  certainly  so  in  this 
instance.  Tennyson  might  have  held  out  against  the 
entreaties  of  his  friends.  But  against  the  menace  of 
this  new  peril  he  was  helpless  to  protect  himself  by 
inaction.  ''You  bore  me  about  my  book,"  he  wrote 
to  FitzGerald  some  time  in  1841;  "so  does  a  letter 
just  received  from  America,  threatening,  tho'  in  the 
civilest  terms,  that,  if  I  will  not  publish  in  England, 
they  will  do  it  for  me  in  that  land  of  freemen."^  In 
contemplating  the  reproduction  of  much  of  his  early 
verse  with  which  he  had  come  to  be  dissatisfied,  he 
might  well  add  as  he  did,  "I  may  curse,  knowing  what 
they  will  bring  forth.  But  I  don't  care."  The  action 
he  was  led  to  take  showed  however  that  he  did  care. 
Something  had  to  be  done  in  order  to  stop  the  trans- 

1' Memoir,'  Vol.  I,  p.  178. 


386  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

atlantic  republication  of  his  earlier  volumes,  some  of 
which  would  doubtless  triumph  over  the  vigilance 
of  the  custom  house  and  find  their  way  into  English 
hands.  At  this  very  time  copies  of  Macaulay's  essays, 
collected  and  printed  in  America,  were  stealing  into 
Great  Britain  in  such  numbers  as  to  force  the  reluctant 
author  to  bring  them  out  early  in  1843  in  a  revised 
form.  So  in  this  case  what  the  urgency  of  friends 
could  not  accomplish,  the  pressure  of  the  book-pirate 
did.  The  prospect  roused  Tennyson  from  his  inaction. 
Groaning  in  spirit  and  doubtless  with  a  good  deal  of 
inward  imprecation  and  certainly  of  inward  trepida- 
tion, he  resolved  to  try  his  fortunes  once  more  with 
the  public. 

It  may  be  added  that  Lowell  took  some  credit  to 
himself  for  bringing  about  this  result.  The  fact  is 
made  known  to  us  in  a  letter  of  his  to  Duyckinck,  then 
editor  of  the  short-lived  literary  periodical  entitled 
'Arcturus.'  It  bears  the  date  of  December  5,  1841. 
In  this  letter,  Lowell  told  his  correspondent  that 
Tennyson  was  to  bring  out ' '  a  new  and  correct  edition 
of  his  poems."  While  he  did  not  wish  to  state  the 
authority  for  the  assertion,  he  assured  him  that  it 
could  be  relied  upon,  for  it  came  from  the  author 
himself.  ' '  I  have  the  great  satisfaction, ' '  he  continued, 
"of  thinking  that  the  publication  is  in  some  measure 
owing  to  myself,  for  it  was  by  my  means  he  was 
written  to  about  it,  and  he  says  that  'his  American 
friends'  are  the  chief  cause  of  his  reprinting."^ 
Accordingly  an  announcement  appeared  in  the  literary 

1  H.  E.  Scudder  's  '  James  Russell  Lowell, '  Vol.  I,  pp.  96-97. 


THE  POEMS  OF  1842  387 

notices  of  'Arcturus'  for  the  following  February  to 
the  effect  that  *'it  is  understood  that  Moxon,  the 
London  publisher,  is  about  to  issue  a  new  edition  of 
the  poems  of  Alfred  Tennyson,  undertaken  by  the 
author,  we  believe,  at  the  solicitation  of  his  American 
friends  and  readers."  The  word  here  italicized  so 
appears  in  the  periodical.  The  exact  feelings  of 
Tennyson  towards  his  American  friends  may  be 
guessed  but  need  not  be  stated.  Still,  as  it  turned  out, 
he  had  far  more  reason  to  rejoice  in  their  interference 
than  to  regret  it. 

The  decision  to  publish  was  unquestionably  a  sur- 
prise to  most  and  probably  to  nearly  all  of  his  English 
admirers.  When  at  last  the  news  spread  about  in 
the  latter  part  of  1841  that  Tennyson  was  about  ''to 
take  the  field,"  as  Trench  expressed  it,  the  statement 
was  received  by  many  with  amazement  that  amounted 
almost  to  incredulity.  In  a  postscript  to  a  letter 
written  in  October  of  this  same  year  by  FitzGerald 
to  Frederick  Tennyson,  he  communicated  to  the  poet's 
brother  the  astounding  information.  "Just  heard 
from  Edgeworth,"  he  said,  ''that  Alfred  is  in  London 
'busy  preparing  for  the  press' ! ! !"  Three  exclamation 
points,  it  was  felt  by  the  writer,  were  necessary  to 
indicate  adequately  the  wonder  of  it.  On  the  part  of 
the  author  himself  we  are  certain  that  he  took  the 
action  he  did  with  few  anticipations  of  success  and 
with  many  misgivings  as  to  failure.  It  is  suggestive, 
however,  of  the  extreme  care  that  Tennyson  inva- 
riably employed  to  perfect  his  work  that  in  this 
instance,  as  in  so  many  others,  he  resorted  to  the 


388  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

precaution  of  printing  a  few  copies  of  some  of  the 
poems  for  private  examination  before  offering  them 
to  the  public.  A  book  of  several  hundred  pages 
preceded  the  publication  of  the  edition  of  1842. 
It  contained  eight  of  his  pieces  in  blank  verse — 
'Morte  d 'Arthur,'  'Dora,'  'The  Gardener's  Daughter,' 
'Audley  Court,'  'Walking  to  the  Mail,'  'St.  Simeon 
Stylites,'  'Ulysses,'  and  'Godiva.'  It  is  hardly  neces- 
sary to  add  that  these  were  scattered  through  the 
second  volume  of  the  edition  of  1842. 

Now  that  we  know  the  results  of  this  venture  we 
can  observe  with  curiosity,  if  not  with  wonder,  the 
anxiety  about  its  success  which  beset  both  the  author 
and  his  friends.  The  almost  universal  belief  that 
there  was  no  market  for  poetry  of  a  high  order  is 
brought  out  constantly  in  the  correspondence  of  the 
period.  Equally  appears  at  intervals  Tennyson's 
peculiar  sensitiveness  to  criticism  and  his  dread  of  it. 
Early  in  1842,  while  his  work  was  in  preparation  for 
the  press,  he  was  a  good  deal  dispirited  by  the 
departure  from  England  of  the  one  friend  upon  whom 
he  had  relied  to  come  to  his  support  from  expected 
attack.  This  was  Spedding,  who  had  gone  to  America 
as  secretary  to  Lord  Ashburton,  dispatched  thither 
to  negotiate  the  settlement  of  the  northeastern  bound- 
ary of  the  United  States.  Spedding,  he  knew,  not 
only  sympathized  with  him  but  believed  in  him  fully. 
Naturally  he  was  downhearted  at  an  absence  whose 
length  could  not  be  foretold.  "Some  fop,"  he  wrote 
to  his  future  brother-in-law,  Lushington,  "will  get  the 


THE  POEMS  OF  1842  389 

start  of  him  in  the  Ed.  Review  where  he  promised  to 
put  an  article,  and  I  have  had  abuse  enough. '  '^ 

That  Tennyson  himself  should  have  feared  failure 
after  his  previous  experience  was  not  unnatural.  But 
the  same  little  anticipation  of  his  acceptance  by  the 
world  at  large  and  consequently  of  the  limited  sale 
of  his  poetical  works  was  exhibited  by  his  warmest 
admirers.  It  continued  too  for  some  time  after  the 
volumes  of  1842  had  come  out.  It  was  very  much  in 
e\T.dence  while  the  business  of  getting  them  ready  for 
publication  was  going  on.  Xo  one  was  a  fuller 
believer  in  the  man  and  the  poet  than  FitzGerald. 
He  was  indeed  no  blind  worshipper.  On  the  contrary 
he  was  wont  to  amuse  himself  with  Spedding's 
uncompromising  partisanship.  Yet  while  confident  in 
the  ultimate  success  of  the  work,  it  is  manifest  that 
at  the  outset  he  had  little  expectation  of  its  immediate 
popularity.  "Alfred,"  he  wrote  to  Frederick  Tenny- 
son in  March,  1842,  '4s  busy  preparing  a  new  volume 
for  the  press  :  full  of  doubts,  troubles,  &c.  The  review- 
ers will  doubtless  be  at  him :  and  with  justice  for  many 
things:  but  some  of  the  poems  will  outlive  the 
reviewers.'"  This  is  so  far  from  being  a  glowing,  it 
is  rather  a  gloomy  prediction  of  immortality;  but  it 
manifestly  expressed  the  feeling  which  prevailed  then 
in  the  inner  circle  of  the  poet's  friends.  It  cannot  be 
said  that  it  augured  hopeful  anticipations  of  success. 

The  printing  of  the  work  was  at  last  completed. 
On  May  14,  1842,  London  papers  contained  the  follow- 

1' Memoir,'  Vol.  I,  p.  180. 

2  FitzGerald 's  'Letters  and  Literary  Remains,'  Vol.  I,  p.  94. 


390  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

ing  advertisement:  ''Just  Published.  Tennyson's 
Poems  in  two  volumes."  This  was  the  simple 
announcement  of  the  venture,  made  without  the 
slightest  preliminary  puffing  or  the  slightest  attempt 
of  any  sort  to  arrest  the  popular  attention.  It  turned 
out  in  time  that  neither  had  been  needed,  though  the 
appearance  in  1842  of  numerous  poetical  rivals  might 
seem  of  itself  to  render  the  prospects  of  this  particular 
work  precarious.  That  year  saw  the  publication  of 
volumes  of  verse  by  veteran  poets  whose  very  names 
might  fairly  be  expected  to  challenge  the  attention  of 
the  public.  In  March  had  come  out  Campbell's  'Pil- 
grim of  Glencoe,'  and  in  April  Wordsworth's  'Poems 
of  Early  and  Late  Years,'  including  the  drama  of 
'  The  Borderers. '  Both  of  these,  it  is  creditable  to  the 
sense  of  the  public,  had  as  little  success  as  if  their 
authors  had  been  utterly  unknown  to  fame.  Early, 
too,  in  July,  Leigh  Hunt  brought  out  'The  Palfrey,  a 
Love-Story  of  Old  Times.' 

These  were  the  work  of  the  veterans.  But  this  same 
year  saw  also  the  publication  of  poems  by  men  of  the 
younger  generation  who  had  already  established 
greater  or  less  claim  to  popular  recognition.  Bulwer 
diversified  his  production  of  novels  by  making  one  of 
his  occasional  ventures  into  poetry  with  the  tale  of 
'Eva.'  Henry  Taylor,  having  recovered  from  the 
shock  of  the  success  of  'Philip  Van  Artevelde,'  had 
come  forward  with  his  third  play,  the  historical  drama 
of  'Edwin  the  Fair.'  Early  in  the  year,  Trench  pub- 
lished a  volume  bearing  the  title  of  'Poems  from 
Eastern   Sources:   The   Steadfast  Prince,   and  other 


THE  POEMS  OF  1842  391 

Poems.'  Towards  its  close  he  came  out  again  with 
a  volume  entitled  'Genoveva.'  Robert  Browning  in 
his  series  of  'Bells  and  Pomegranates'  brought  to  the 
attention  of  a  world  now  become  unheedf ul,  his  drama 
of  'King  Victor  and  King  Charles,'  and  later,  what 
was  of  far  more  importance,  his  'Dramatic  Lyrics.' 
Even  our  old  friend,  the  now  forgotten  Robert  Mont- 
gomery— who  as  regards  the  sale  of  his  works  had  been 
far  the  most  successful  writer  of  verse  of  the  fourth 
decade  just  so  long  as  he  continued  to  write  it — turned 
momentarily  aside  from  the  equally  successful  business 
of  preacMng,  and  produced  a  ponderous  poem  entitled 
'  Luther. '  This  he  besought  Carlyle  to  review.  Though 
Carlyle  refused  to  criticise  this  "rhymed  rigmarole," 
as  he  termed  it — the  rigmarole  chanced  to  be  in  blank 
verse — the  public  did  not  refuse  to  buy.  The  work 
appeared  late  in  February ;  early  in  May  it  went  into 
a  second  edition,  and  a  third  came  out  in  1843,  and  a 
fourth  in  1846.  But  the  great  success  of  the  year  was 
Macaulay's  'Lays  of  Ancient  Rome.'  The  volume 
appeared  in  October.  It  at  once  gained  a  popularity 
which  it  has  never  since  lost.  Altogether  1842  was 
remarkable  for  its  number  of  poetical  ventures.  In 
the  general  assault  which  was  made  then  upon  the 
attention  of  the  public  from  so  many  sources  of 
interest,  the  year  is  to  us  now  mainly  memorable  for 
the  production  of  the  two  volumes  of  Tennyson's 
poems. 

Before  describing  the  reception  which  these  two 
volumes  met,  it  is  desirable  to  say  something  of  their 
contents.    The  second  was  made  up  of  matter  hitherto 


392  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

imprinted  with  the  exception  of  the  poem  of  'St. 
Agnes,'  and  the  three  stanzas  entitled  'The  Sleeping 
Beauty, '  which  came  now  to  serve  as  the  nucleus  about 
which  was  built  up  '  The  Day  Dream. '  On  the  contrary, 
the  first  consisted  mainly  of  pieces  which  had  appeared 
in  the  previous  volumes  of  1830  and  1832.  Of  the 
fifty-six  poems  which  were  found  in  the  former,  the 
majority  were  discarded.  In  those  which  were  retained 
very  few  alterations  were  made.  Not  so  of  the  volume 
of  1832.  Of  thirty  poems  which  there  appeared,  most 
of  the  important  ones  were  selected  to  be  included  in 
the  new  edition.  With  the  exception  of  the  one 
entitled '  Hesperides '  and  two  of  the  feminine  portraits, 
'Rosalind'  and  'Kate,'  those  retained  embrace  all  that 
were  of  any  length  without  saying  anything  whatever 
as  to  their  quality.  But  to  this  same  first  volume  were 
added  seven  poems  hitherto  unprinted.  They  were 
entitled  'Lady  Clara  Vere  de  Vere,'  'The  Blackbird,' 
the  conclusion  of  'The  May  Queen,'  and  the  three 
pieces  dealing  with  the  development  of  English  liberty, 
which  bore  respectively  as  their  first  lines:  "You 
ask  me,  why,  though  ill  at  ease,"  "Of  old  sat  Freedom 
on  the  heights,"  and  "Love  thou  thy  land,  with  love 
far-bought."  Finally  there  was  added  the  poem 
entitled  'The  Goose.'  It  would  have  been  no  loss  to 
the  volume  had  this  never  appeared.  With  one 
exception  the  composition  of  the  seven  belonged  to 
the  year  1833. 

It  was  the  changes  made  in  the  selections  taken  from 
the  'Poems'  of  1832  which  constituted  the  most 
distinctive  feature  of  this  first  volume.    That  changes 


THE  POEMS  OF  1842  393 

should  be  made  by  Tennyson  was  inevitable.  As 
regards  their  methods  of  composition  poets  divide 
themselves  into  two  broadly  distinct  classes.  In  the 
members  of  the  first,  the  conceptions  are  struck  out 
at  a  heat.  They  find  at  once  adequate  expression,  or 
at  all  events  such  expression  as  the  writer  is  either 
unable  or  indisposed  to  modify  materially.  They 
come  forth  perfect  in  his  eyes  or  near  enough  per- 
fection to  prevent  his  bestowing  upon  them  any 
further  care.  Now  and  then  one  word  may  eventually 
be  substituted  for  another,  now  and  then  a  line  or 
a  passage  may  be  remodelled.  But  beyond  this  chance 
attention  to  details  there  is  no  serious  effort  put  forth 
to  alter  the  original  form  to  any  extent  worth  consid- 
ering. To  use  an  outworn  comparison,  Minerva  has 
sprung  full-panoplied  from  the  head  of  Jove.  It  is 
consequently  felt  to  be  a  work  of  supererogation  to 
make  any  change  in  her  armor.  On  the  other  hand, 
vdth  poets  of  the  second  class  the  expression  is  built 
up  elaborately.  It  is  by  slow  degrees  that  the  pile 
reaches  the  perfection  aimed  at.  The  glow  that 
illuminates  their  pages  is  not  due  to  lightning  flashes 
of  inspiration.  It  is  the  result  of  steady  and  prolonged 
blaze.  Poets  of  this  order  are  not  necessarily  either 
greater  or  lesser  literary  artists  than  those  belonging 
to  the  other;  but  they  are  distinctly  more  conscious. 
Nor  is  there  justification  for  claiming  superiority 
for  the  procedure  emploj^ed  by  the  poets  of  either  one 
of  these  two  classes.  In  the  instance  of  each  the 
method  is  followed  by  the  writer  which  is  for  him  the 
most  suitable  for  embodying  effectually  in  verse  what 


394  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

he  seeks  to  say.  Furthermore,  while  these  classes 
have  in  general  a  broad  line  of  demarcation,  it  does 
not  follow  that  the  division  between  them  extends 
invariably  to  particulars.  The  writer  of  the  one  class 
occasionally  invades  the  province  of  the  other.  Those 
of  the  first  sometimes,  though  not  often,  employ,  at 
least  for  short  pieces  or  passages,  the  slowly  elabo- 
rating processes  of  the  second.  More  frequently  the 
poets  of  this  second  class  produce  in  a  moment  of 
inspiration  some  piece,  in  which  so  far  as  they  are 
concerned,  no  further  change  is  felt  to  be  feasible  or 
desirable.  Furthermore  there  are  poets  who  seem  to 
belong  sometimes  to  one  of  these  classes  and  some- 
times to  the  other.  It  is  only  a  broad  general  division 
that  is  outlined  here ;  it  will  never  hold  true  of  all  its 
details. 

Of  this  second  class  of  writers  whose  poetic  product 
is  the  result  of  elaborate  workmanship,  Tennyson  is 
certainly  a  conspicuous  representative.  The  fact  was 
made  very  evident  in  the  contents  of  this  first  volume 
of  the  'Poems'  of  1842.  Some  of  the  pieces  retained 
from  the  volume  of  1832  were  indeed  left  unchanged. 
But  alterations  there  were  in  others  of  them  on  the 
most  extensive  scale.  This  was  particularly  noticeable 
in  Parts  I  and  IV  of  '  The  Lady  of  Shalott, '  in  '  Mariana 
in  the  South,'  in  'The  Miller's  Daughter,  in  'OEnone,' 
in  'The  Palace  of  Art,'  in  'The  Dream  of  Fair  Women,' 
and  in  the  choric  song  of  'The  Lotos-Eaters.'  No 
student  of  Tennyson's  writings  needs  to  be  told  that 
these  are  the  most  important  poems  of  the  volume  of 
1832.    The  changes  they  individually  underwent  form 


THE  POEMS  OF  1842  395 

in  consequence  a  curious  study  in  the  methods  employed 
by  the  poet  to  perfect  his  work.  Stanzas  were  omitted, 
stanzas  were  added.  In  certain  instances  the  changes 
were  so  numerous  and  on  so  grand  a  scale  that  the 
sum  of  them  amounted  almost  to  recasting  the  whole 
poem  or  some  particular  part  of  it. 

Great  was  the  outcry  that  arose  in  consequence  in 
many  quarters.  The  desirability  of  any  of  these 
alterations  was  doubted  by  several  even  of  the  poet's 
warmest  admirers.  By  some  of  them  vehement  protest 
was  made.  It  was  certainly  very  hard  for  those  who 
had  become  familiar  with  the  lines  as  they  had  origi- 
nally appeared,  to  accept  any  change  whatever.  This 
is  a  feeling  which  must  always  be  taken  into  consid- 
eration in  any  criticism  made  by  those  of  us  to  whom 
the  first  form  of  a  poem  is  the  form  by  which  we  have 
learned  to  love  it.  In  such  cases  we  are  hardly 
competent  judges  of  the  propriety  or  excellence  of 
the  alterations  made.  Our  ears  have  been  attuned  by 
time  and  custom  to  the  flow  of  certain  words  in  a 
certain  order.  Anything  which  disturbs  this  melody 
which  has  become  part  of  our  mental  equipment  is  apt 
to  jar  painfully  upon  the  literary  sense.  The  old 
associations  have  been  broken  up.  The  new  ones  have 
not  only  to  be  created — itself  a  work  of  time — but  they 
must  displace  from  remembrance  and  regard  the  old 
ones  to  which  our  ears  have  become  accustomed.  The 
music  in  which  we  delighted  is  lost,  and  we  have  little 
inclination  to  adapt  ourselves  to  any  new  tune,  even 
if  judges,  recognized  by  us  as  competent  and  impartial, 
should  proclaim  its  superiority ;  and  in  such  cases  the 


396  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

only  impartial  judges  are  those  who  come  to  the  con- 
sideration of  the  two  versions  without  having  been 
previously  familiar  with  either. 

It  was  accordingly  inevitable  that  many  should  be 
grieved  by  the  changes  made,  who  were  far  from 
unfriendly  to  the  poet.  Two  of  these  criticisms  are 
worth  noting  coming  from  the  persons  they  did.  In 
January,  1844,  an  article  on  Tennyson's  two  volumes 
appeared  in  the  'Democratic  Review'  published  in 
New  York.  It  was  the  production  of  Fanny  Kemble 
Butler.  Of  Tennyson,  as  we  have  seen,  she  had  been 
one  of  the  most  extravagant  of  the  original  admirers. 
As  the  poet  was  an  intimate  friend  of  her  brother, 
John  Mitchell  Kemble,  not  only  literary  taste  but 
family  feeling  would  tend  to  make  her  a  partisan. 
Naturally  there  was  no  restraint  in  the  expression  of 
her  admiration  for  the  genius  which  had  been  dis- 
played in  the  new  poems  appearing  then  for  the  first 
time.  But  along  Avith  this  went  unhesitating  condem- 
nation of  the  alterations  which  had  been  made  in  the 
old  ones.  ''He  has  changed,"  she  wrote,  "and  in  our 
opinion  has  very  nearly  ruined  some  of  his  best  early 
poems,  at  the  same  time  that  he  puts  forth  new  ones 
incomparably  superior  to  those  at  their  unaltered 
best."  She  regarded  this  retrograde  and  progressive 
process,  as  she  called  it,  the  most  singular  mental 
phenomenon  in  the  range  of  modern  literature.  All 
the  alterations  were  in  her  eyes  alterations  for  the 
worse.  She  was  unable,  for  instance,  to  speak  with 
patience  of  the  changes  made  in  one  of  the  songs 
found  in  'The  Miller's  Daughter.'     The  verses,  she 


THE  POEMS  OF  1842  397 

thought  only  tolerable  as  they  stood  originally;  as 
they  now  appeared,  they  were  unmitigated  twaddle. 

It  is  a  singular  illustration  of  the  force  of  association 
working  in  a  person  of  superior  intellect  and  of 
refined  taste  that  preference  could  be  given  by  Fanny 
Kemble  to  the  conclusion  of  the  choric  song  in  'The 
Lotos-Eaters,'  as  found  in  the  old  version,  to  the  far 
more  effective  and  poetical  lines  which  were  found 
in  the  new.  The  most  virulent  critic  of  Tennyson  never 
exhibited  much  more  pronounced  evidence  of  incom- 
petence than  did  here  this  enthusiastic  admirer.  Later 
in  life  she  admitted  that  the  changes  she  deplored  did 
not  appear  deplorable  to  others,  but  distinct  improve- 
ments. It  is  manifest  that  in  regard  to  the  excellence 
of  the  alterations  made  she  had  come  to  find  herself 
in  a  hopeless  minority.  Her  work  entitled  'Eecords 
of  a  Girlhood'  was  published  in  1878.  In  it  she 
repeated  her  previous  opinion  in  regard  to  these 
changes,  or  rather  the  feelings  she  had  once  had  about 
them.  But  she  further  confessed  that  what  had 
seemed  to  her  desecrations  did  not  seem  so  to  the 
modern  reader.  ''In  justice  to  Tennyson,"  she  said, 
"I  must  add  that  the  present  generation  of  his  readers 
swear  by  their  version  of  his  poems  as  we  did  by  ours, 
for  the  same  reason, — they  knew  it  first. ' ' 

As  being  more  open  to  fair  difference  of  opinion, 
it  may  be  worth  while  to  set  side  by  side  the  two 
versions  of  the  song  in  'The  Miller's  Daughter,' 
partly  to  show  in  small  space  something  of  the  nature 
and  extent  of  the  changes  made  by  the  poet  and  partly 


398  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

to  give  the  reader  an  opportunity  to  decide  for  himself 
on  their  respective  merits : 

Edition  of  1832 

I  wish  I  were  her  earring, 

Ambushed  in  auburn  ringlets  sleek, 

(So  might  my  shadow  tremble 
Over  her  downy  cheek,) 

Hid  in  her  hair,  all  day  and  night, 

Touching  her  neck  so  warm  and  white. 

I  wish  I  were  the  girdle 

Buckled  about  her  dainty  waist, 

That  her  heart  might  beat  against  me. 
In  sorrow  and  in  rest. 

I  should  know  well  if  it  beat  right, 

I  'd  clasp  it  round  so  close  and  tight. 

I  wish  I  were  her  necklace. 

So  might  I  ever  fall  and  rise 
Upon  her  balmy  bosom 

With  her  laughter,  or  her  sighs. 
I  would  lie  round  so  warm  and  light 
I  would  not  be  unclasped  at  night. 


Edition  of  1842 

It  is  the  miller's  daughter. 

And  she  is  grown  so  dear,  so  dear, 

That  I  would  be  the  jewel 
That  trembles  at  her  ear ; 

For  hid  in  ringlets  day  and  night, 

I'd  touch  her  neck  so  warm  and  white. 


THE  POEMS  OF  1842  399 

And  I  would  be  the  girdle 

About  her  dainty,  dainty  waist, 
And  her  heart  would  beat  against  me, 

In  sorrow  and  in  rest : 
And  I  should  know  if  it  beat  right, 

I'd  clasp  it  round  so  close  and  tight. 

And  I  would  be  the  necklace. 

And  all  day  long  to  fall  and  rise 
Upon  her  balmy  bosom, 

With  her  laughter  or  her  sighs, 
And  I  would  lie  so  light,  so  light, 

I  scarce  should  be  unclasp 'd  at  night. ^ 

The  other  criticism  came  from  an  even  more  famous 
quarter.  In  a  letter  of  July  13,  1842,  Browning  gave 
to  Alfred  Domett  his  opinion  of  the  changes  which 
had  been  made  in  this  first  volume,  as  well  as  of  some 

1  In  an  article  in  '  The  New  London  Literary  Gazette '  of  August  25, 
1827,  on  specimens  of  the  early  Greek  poets,  there  is  an  English  poem 
"formed  from  two  or  three  fragments  not  inserted  in  the  epigrams  of 
Meleager. "  "I  have  endeavored,"  says  the  author  of  the  article,  "to 
give  a  specimen  of  a  style  of  love-song  so  common  among  the  Greek 
lyric  poets."     Then  follow  these  verses: 

I  wish  I  were  the  bowl. 

The  bowl  that  she  kisses, 
I  would  breathe  away  my  soul 

In  the  goblet  of  blisses. 

I  wish  I  were  a  flower, 

Or  the  dove  which  sings 
In  the  evening  bower 

With  sunset  on  her  wings. 

For  if  I  were  a  flower, 

I  should  sleep  upon  her  breast ; 
And  if  I  were  a  dove, 

I  would  sing  her  to  her  rest. 

And  lovely  her  slumbers, 

And  sweet  her  dream  should  be, 

And  beautiful  her  waking. 
If  watched  by  me. 


400  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

of  the  poems  contained  in  the  second.  ''I  send  with 
this,"  he  wrote,  ''Tennyson's  new  vol.,  and,  alas,  the 
old  with  it — that  is,  what  he  calls  old.  You  will  see, 
and  groan!  The  alterations  are  insane.  Whatever 
is  touched  is  spoiled.  There  is  some  woeful  infirmity 
in  the  man — he  was  months  buried  in  correcting  the 
press  of  the  last  volume,  and  in  that  time  began  spoil- 
ing the  new  poems  (in  proof)  as  hard  as  he  could. 
'Locksley  Hall'  is  shorn  of  two  or  three  couplets.  I 
will  copy  out  from  the  book  of  somebody  who  luckily 
transcribed  from  the  proof-sheet — meantime  one  line, 
you  will  see,  I  have  restored — see  and  wonder !  I  have 
been  with  Moxon  this  morning,  who  tells  me  that 
he  is  miserably  thin-skinned,  sensitive  to  criticism 
(foolish  criticism),  wishes  to  see  no  notices  that 
contain  the  least  possible  depreciatory  expressions — 
poor  fellow!  But  how  good  when  good  he  is — that 
noble  'Locksley  Hall,'  for  instance — and  'St.  Simeon 
Stylites' — which  I  think  perfect.  ...  To  think  that 
he  has  omitted  the  musical  'Forget-me-not'  song,  and 
'The  Hesperides' — and  the  'Deserted  House' — and 
'everything  that  is  his,'  as  distinguished  from  what 
is  everybody's."^ 

To  men  who  have  made  themselves  familiar  -with 
the  changes  which  are  found  in  these  poems,  it  is  not 
Tennyson's  alterations  that  will  seem  insane  but 
Browning's  criticism.  But  these  remarks  of  his  render 
it  a  matter  of  moment  to  correct  the  error  on  this  point 
into  which  he  fell  at  this  time  as  well  as  later.  It  is 
one,  too,  into  which  friends  as  well  as  enemies  of  the 

1' Browning  and  Domett,'  edited  by  F.  G.  Kenyon,  1906,  p.  40. 


THE  POEMS  OF  1842  401 

poet  have  been  betrayed.  Never  assuredly  was  an 
author  more  sensitive  to  critical  attack  than  was 
Tennyson,  so  far  as  his  feelings  were  concerned. 
Never  was  one  more  independent  of  it  in  his  action. 
The  only  maker  of  it  to  whose  judgment  he  paid  much 
heed  was  himself.  Suggestions  from  friendly  quarters 
he  sometimes  sought.  Even  those  unsought  he  fully 
considered.  But  there  is  no  evidence  that  anything, 
whether  coming  from  favorable  or  unfavorable 
sources,  determined,  save  in  occasional  instances, 
liis  own  conclusions.  On  the  contrary,  the  evidence 
is  overwhelming  that  it  did  not.  He  sometimes  looked 
with  a  sort  of  perverse  fondness  upon  poems  which 
his  warmest  admirers  regarded  with  extreme  disfavor. 
Not  merely  in  spite  of  the  attacks  of  the  hostile,  but 
against  the  remonstrances  of  the  friendly  he  persisted 
in  publishing  and  republishing  pieces  which  it  would 
have  been  to  his  credit  to  have  dropped  entirely. 
Hostile  criticism  had  no  perceptible  effect  in  dictating 
the  omissions  or  alterations  which  were  found  in  the 
edition  of  1842.  The  poems  appearing  in  his  first  two 
ventures  which  he  failed  to  republish  there  would  have 
been  thrown  out  in  any  case.  For  his  feelings  about 
some  of  those  contained  in  the  volume  of  1830  we  have 
at  an  early  period  the  unimpeachable  testimony  of  his 
most  intimate  friend.  "They  little  know  the  while," 
wrote  Hallam,  after  Wilson's  review  in  'Blackwood,' 
**that  you  despise  the  false  parts  of  your  volume  quite 
as  vehemently  as  your  censors  can,  and  with  purer  zeal, 
because  with  better  knowledge."^ 

1 '  Memoir, '  Vol.  I,  p.  84. 


402  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

But  the  opposite  impression  has  been  so  long  preva- 
lent that  it  has  become  prevailing.  The  view  indicated 
by  it  has  been  so  stoutly  held  and  so  persistently 
proclaimed  that  the  mere  assertion  of  its  falsity  will 
seem  to  most  men  like  a  denial  of  the  self-evident. 
Accordingly  it  becomes  important  to  make  a  critical 
inquiry  into  the  matter  and  to  bring  out  the  facts  too 
unmistakably  to  admit  of  further  question.  This  can 
be  best  done  by  an  exposure  of  two  representative 
misstatements  of  Tennyson's  course,  coming  as  these 
do  from  sources  more  than  ordinarily  authoritative. 
It  will  show  beyond  question  that,  however  much  the 
poet 's  feelings  were  outraged  by  attack,  his  action  was 
never  influenced  by  it.  The  first  of  these  misstate- 
ments is  found  in  the  biography  of  Professor  Wilson 
written  by  his  daughter,  Mrs.  Gordon.  In  it  occurs 
a  comment  upon  the  review  in  'Blackwood'  of  Tenny- 
son's first  volume.  "The  young  poet,"  wrote  Mrs. 
Gordon,  ''although  evidently  nettled,  received  the 
criticism  in  good  part."  Whatever  the  daughter  may 
have  thought,  the  father,  it  will  be  seen  later,  did  not 
deem  that  his  criticism  had  been  taken  in  good  part, 
and  still  less  did  he  take  in  good  part  the  retort. 
Mrs.  Gordon  adds  that  the  poet  profited  by  the  review. 
"On  reading  the  paper,"  she  wrote,  "I  observe  that, 
with  scarcely  a  single  exception,  the  verses  condemned 
by  the  critic  were  omitted  or  altered  in  after  editions." 

The  remark  does  little  credit  to  Mrs.  Gordon's  keen- 
ness of  observation.  Undoubtedly  a  number  of  poems 
which  Wilson  condemned  were  omitted  from  the 
edition  of  1842.     So  also  were  a  far  larger  number 


THE  POEMS  OF  1842  403 

of  which  he  had  expressed  no  opinion  whatever.  But 
not  to  the  critic's  praise  or  dispraise  was  this  action 
of  the  poet  attributable.  In  truth  the  omissions  which 
Mrs.  Gordon  could  not  find  and  the  alterations  which 
she  did  find  must  be  credited  to  imperfect  examination 
or  to  imagination  working  under  no  restraint  of  fact. 
To  dispose  effectively  of  her  assertions,  it  is  the  easiest 
course  to  take  a  brief  journey  to  the  dreary  realm  of 
statistics.  The  volume  of  1830,  reviewed  by  Wilson, 
contained  precisely  fifty-six  pieces.  Of  these,  twenty- 
four  were  reprinted  in  the  edition  of  1842.  Conse- 
quently thirty-two  were  discarded.  Of  the  fifty-six 
poems  of  this  first  volume  Wilson  had  specifically 
mentioned  thirty.  Of  the  thirty  specified,  he  had 
condemned  eighteen,  and  had  commended  twelve.  Of 
the  eighteen  censured  six  were  reprinted  in  the  edition 
of  1842.  These  were  'The  Dying  Swan'  and  the  two 
songs  to  'The  Owl';  'The  Poet's  Mind,'  characterized 
by  the  critic  as  "partly  prettyish  but  mainly  silly"; 
'The  Merman,'  "a  sorry  affair";  and  'The  Mermaid,' 
"of  an  amorous  temperament,  and  a  strong  Anti- 
Malthusian. ' ' 

All  of  these,  the  harsh  language  employed  by  Wilson 
did  not  prevent  Tennyson  from  reprinting;  and  if 
there  are  any  alterations  to  be  found  in  them,  Mrs. 
Gordon's  eyes  are  the  only  ones  which  have  discovered 
them.  There  was  indeed  an  omission  of  six  lines  in 
'The  Poet's  Mind,'  but  the  dropping  of  these  was 
manifestly  not  caused  by  the  criticism;  for  that  was 
directed  to  the  whole  piece  and  not  to  any  particular 
portion  of  it.    Of  the  poems  which  Wilson  commended 


404  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

two  were  not  included  in  the  edition  of  1842.  One  of 
these  indeed, — 'Hero  to  Leander' — was  never  reprinted 
in  any  authorized  collection  of  Tennyson's  works. 
Furthermore,  it  is  to  be  added  that  of  the  twenty-six 
poems  which  Wilson  did  not  mention  either  for  praise 
or  blame,  nineteen  were  thrown  out  by  the  author's 
own  decision.  These  statements  are  dry ;  but  they  are 
convincing.  They  show  that  in  the  choice  of  the  poems 
he  determined  to  discard  or  to  retain,  Tennyson  made 
up  his  own  mind  independently.  It  is  manifest  from 
his  course  in  this  as  in  later  acts  that  he  paid  little 
deference  to  the  mind  of  his  critics.  In  stating  the 
facts  just  recorded  there  is  no  expression  of  opinion 
as  to  the  justice  of  Wilson's  views.  They  are  given 
merely  to  point  out  their  ineffectiveness  in  influencing 
the  action  of  the  poet. 

The  next  is  a  far  more  flagrant  instance  of  misstate- 
ment, for  it  lacks  even  the  semblance  of  truth.  It 
occurs  in  a  letter  written  in  February,  1845,  by  Brown- 
ing to  the  woman  later  to  become  his  wife.  He  was 
engaged  in  his  favorite  exercise  of  proclaiming  his 
own  independence  of  criticism.  ''For  Keats  and 
Tennyson,"  he  wrote,  "to  'go  softly  all  their  days' 
for  a  gruff  word  or  two  is  quite  inexplicable  to  me, 
and  always  has  been.  Tennyson  reads  the  Quarterly 
and  does  as  they  bid  him,  with  the  most  solemn  face 
in  the  world— out  goes  this,  in  goes  that,  all  is  changed 
and  ranged.  Oh  me!"  Well  might  he  have  said 
"Oh  me!";  for  had  he  taken  the  pains  to  make  even 
a  superficial  examination  of  the  article  in  the  'Quar- 
terly' and  the  poems  as  republished  he  would  have 


THE  POEMS  OF  1842  405 

discovered  that  his  assertion  lacked  even  that  decent 
homage  to  fact  which  characterizes  respectable  fiction. 
It  sprang  largely  from  his  own  inability  to  correct 
anything  which  he  himself  had  once  written,  and  the 
fancy  he  came  to  have  in  consequence  that  corrections 
made  by  others  arose  out  of  deference  to  the  opinions 
of  critics  and  not  to  the  decisions  of  their  own  judg- 
ments which  these  writers  had  independently  reached. 
There  is  indeed  palliation,  though  not  pardon,  for 
Browning's  misstatement  in  an  even  then  prevalent 
belief  that  Tennyson  paid  profound  respect  to  Lock- 
hart's  criticisms  and  modified  his  poems  so  as  to 
conform  to  them.  This  belief  began  early  and  flour- 
ishes even  to  this  day  with  all  the  vigor  which 
characterizes  mendacity  once  started  on  its  travels. 
It  has  been  repeated  again  and  again  by  writers  both 
of  good  and  of  ill  repute ;  by  writers  who  were  hostile 
to  Tennyson,  and  by  those  who  have  been  among  his 
warmest  admirers.  Take  two  of  the  latter  class.  As 
early  as  1845  Charles  Astor  Bristed,  in  a  highly  favor- 
able criticism  of  the  volumes  of  1842,  repeated  this 
utterly  baseless  statement  in  speaking  of  the  article 
in  the  'Quarterly.'^  "The  harsh  censure,"  he  said, 
''was  to  him  wholesome  advice,  which  he  has  used 
to  good  purpose.  Of  all  the  passages  assailed  by  the 
reviewer,  there  is  but  one  which  has  not  been  either 
entirely  expunged  or  carefully  rewritten."  This  one 
was  a  line  in  'The  Dream  of  Fair  Women'  in  the 
description  of  Iphigenia.    Similar  testimony  was  borne 

1 ' Knickerbocker  Magazine,'  June,  1845,  Vol.  XXV,  p.  536. 


406  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

by  Andrew  Lang  as  late  as  1897/  "The  illustrious 
poet,"  lie  wrote,  "unlike  any  other  poet  known  to 
history,  altered  the  passages  which  gave  such  advan- 
tages to  criticism."  It  will  speedily  be  shown  that 
the  illustrious  poet  did  nothing  of  the  kind. 

Unquestionably  in  the  edition  of  1842  many  changes 
had  been  made  in  those  of  its  poems  which  had 
appeared  in  the  volume  of  1832.  Not  only  had  there 
been  omissions  and  additions;  but  in  several  of  them 
alterations  had  taken  place  on  a  grand  scale.  Some 
of  the  pieces  which  Lockhart  had  attacked  were  with- 
drawn. Far  more  were  withdrawn  of  which  nothing 
whatever  had  been  said.  The  action  Tennyson  took 
was  not  due  to  the  dissatisfaction  expressed  by  his 
reviewer  with  what  he  had  done,  but  was  due  to  his 
own  dissatisfaction  with  it.  No  one  was  a  severer 
critic  of  his  own  writings  than  he  was  himself.  But 
in  this  particular  case  the  question  that  concerns  us 
is  how  far  the  changes  made  in  the  poems  republished 
were  due  to  Lockhart 's  criticism.  To  that  of  course 
could  not  be  attributed  the  numerous  additions  which 
are  found.  To  settle  the  dispute  as  to  the  omissions 
and  alterations,  we  have  again  to  betake  ourselves  to 
statistics.  Let  us  consider  first  those  which  were  not 
reprinted.  Of  the  thirty  poems  contained  in  the 
edition  of  1832,  sixteen  appeared  in  the  edition  of  1842. 
Fourteen  consequently  were  discarded.  Five  of  the 
discarded  had  been  attacked  by  Lockhart ;  of  the  other 
nine  he  had  made  no  mention.  Of  these  five  censured 
by  him  two  would  certainly  have  never  appeared  under 

lA.  Lang's  'Lockhart,'  Vol.  II,  p.  88. 


THE  POEMS  OF  1842  407 

any  circumstances  in  any  edition  brought  out  by 
Tennyson  under  his  own  super\dsion.  One  of  these 
consisted  of  the  lines  to  Christopher  North,  of  which 
we  know  that  he  himself  had  become  ashamed  almost 
as  soon  as  they  were  published.  The  other  was  the 
'  0  Darling  Room, '  of  which  every  admirer  of  the  poet 
was  then  more  or  less  ashamed. 

Of  the  other  three  attacked  by  Lockhart  and  dis- 
carded by  Tennyson,  one  was  the  sonnet  i^ith  which 
the  book  opened.  As  the  poet  in  the  edition  of  1842 
did  not  include  any  of  the  sonnets  contained  in  the 
volume  of  1832 — there  were  six  in  all — it  is  hardly 
reasonable  to  infer  that  the  omission  of  this  particular 
one  was  due  to  the  criticism  passed  upon  it  in  the 
*  Quarterly. '  Another  one  of  the  discarded  poems  was 
the  verses  addressed  to  an  unknown  friend  beginning 
''All  good  things  have  not  kept  aloof."  The  third 
was  the  poem  entitled  'The  Hesperides' — the  only  one 
of  any  length  not  included  in  the  edition  of  1842.  In 
fact  this  piece  never  appeared  in  any  edition  of  Tenny- 
son's w^orks  during  his  lifetime.  But  besides  these 
five  discarded  by  the  poet  there  were  eight  others 
attacked  by  Lockhart  which  were  retained.  These 
eight  were  'The  Lady  of  Shalott,'  'Mariana  in  the 
South,'  'Eleanore,'  'The  Miller's  Daughter,'  'CEnone,' 
'The  Palace  of  Art,'  'The  Dream  of  Fair  Women,'  and 
'The  Lotos-Eaters.'  The  very  titles  of  these  pieces 
singled  out  for  reprobation  by  Lockhart  will  give  the 
modern  reader  a  conception  of  the  taste  and  acumen 
displayed  by  the  critic. 

Still,  it  may  be  and  has  been  urged  that  while  they 


408  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

were  not  discarded,  their  character  was  so  changed 
in  consequence  of  the  criticism  they  received  that  the 
effectiveness  if  not  the  justice  of  the  attack  was  proved 
by  the  action  taken  by  the  poet.  It  accordingly  becomes 
necessary  here  to  explode  this  fiction  also.  Let  us 
consider  separately  each  of  the  eight  poems  condemned. 
'Eleanore'  and  'Mariana  in  the  South'  had  been  passed 
by  Lockhart  with  censure  merely,  but  with  no  detailed 
criticism.  This  was  done,  he  assured  us,  because  he 
''could  make  no  intelligible  extract."  'Eleanore' 
appeared  in  the  edition  of  1842  with  the  slightest 
possible  alteration.  The  poem,  accordingly,  was  left 
in  its  original  unintelligibility.  On  the  other  hand, 
'Mariana  in  the  South'  underwent  very  marked 
changes.  The  opening  stanza,  as  the  poem  originally 
appeared,  was  struck  out  and  another  substituted. 
The  fifth  and  sixth  stanzas  of  the  piece  as  it  now 
stands  were  added.  Furthermore  in  the  body  of  the 
poem  many  important  alterations  were  made.  Still, 
as  in  the  case  of  this  piece  nothing  had  been  specified 
by  Lockhart,  nothing  done  to  it  in  the  way  of  omission, 
addition,  or  alteration  in  particulars  can  well  be 
attributed  to  any  remark  of  his.  The  same  sort  of 
examination,  applied  to  'The  Lady  of  Shalott,' 
specifically  criticised  by  him,  mil  show  a  similar 
result.  The  words  and  phrases  in  it  which  had  been 
marked  for  censure — in  some  instances  most  foolishly 
marked — were  rarely  changed  at  all.  It  is  further 
safe  to  say  that  none  were  changed  because  they  had 
been  so  marked.  There  were  in  the  extracts  he  quoted 
eleven  of  these  words  and  phrases  which  Lockhart 


THE  POEMS  OF  1842  409 

had  italicized  for  the  sake  of  holding  them  up  to 
ridicule.  Of  these  eleven,  nine  were  retained,  two 
were  altered. 

Essentially  the  same  story  can  be  told  about  'The 
Miller's  Daughter.'  In  this  the  changes  were  very 
numerous  and  very  great  throughout.  For  one  of  the 
songs  contained  in  it — 'The  Forget-me-not'  song 
deplored  by  Browning — an  entirely  different  one  was 
substituted.  The  opening  stanza  of  the  poem  was 
dropped  as  were  three  others.  These  stanzas  were 
all  which  Lockhart  had  ridiculed.  Even  of  two  of 
these  four  it  would  be  more  proper  to  say  that  they 
were  condensed  rather  than  omitted;  and  with  the 
condensation  certain  words  and  phrases  italicized  by 
the  critic  were  thro^vn  out.  Among  these  lines  he  had 
censured  were  the  following  two: 

The  very  air  about  the  door 

Made  misty  with  the  floating  meal. 

What  fault  could  be  found  which  should  cause  them 
to  be  placed  in  italics  in  the  review,  it  is  hard  for  the 
modern  reader  to  discover.  It  is  giving  too  much 
credit  to  Tennyson's  susceptibility  to  attack,  extreme 
as  it  was,  to  fancy  that  he  was  led  to  discard  them 
in  consequence  of  the  absurd  criticism  to  w^hich  they 
had  been  subjected.  But  beside  the  four  stanzas 
rejected,  four  others  were  cut  out  of  which  noth- 
ing had  been  said.  Three  others  also  were  added. 
Furthermore,  many  were  the  minor  changes  made, 
which  nothing  in  Lockhart 's  review  had  suggested. 
Men  who  concede  that  Tennyson  did  not  pay  much 


410  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

heed  to  Lockhart's  criticism  generally  have,  however, 
been  found  disposed  to  insist  that  in  the  case  of 
*  CEnone '  he  did.  This  poem  was  so  thoroughly  revised 
and  recast  for  the  edition  of  1842  that  it  was  to  some 
extent  a  new  work.  From  it,  as  it  originally  appeared, 
Lockhart  quoted  twenty-six  lines  for  ridicule.  Of 
these  twenty-six,  eight  disappeared  in  the  revision. 
Eighteen  were  retained  unaltered.  In  these  eighteen 
retained  could  be  found  eight  words  and  phrases  which 
had  been  specifically  selected  for  censure  by  being 
printed  in  italics.  In  not  one  of  them  was  the  slightest 
alteration  made.  But  there  was  one  peculiarity  of 
the  poem  with  which  the  critic  had  made  himself 
especially  merry.  This  was  the  formula,  repeated 
again  and  again  with  slight  variations: 

Dear  mother  Ida,  hearken  ere  I  die. 

Lockhart  took  pains  to  satisfy  himself  about  the 
frequency  of  the  occurrence  of  this  line  by  counting 
it,  whenever  it  appeared.  Sixteen  times  he  found  it 
repeated.  The  fact  he  emphasized  by  italicizing  the 
numeral.  If  he  had  taken  the  additional  pains  to 
count  it  correctly,  his  heart  would  have  been  further 
gladdened  by  finding  that  it  did  not  occur  sixteen  times 
but  seventeen.  Bad  as  the  smaller  number  was  in 
Lockhart 's  eyes,  Tennyson  showed  the  abjectness  of 
his  deference  to  the  critic  by  repeating  the  line  nine- 
teen times  in  the  revision  of  1842. 

An  examination  of  the  three  remaining  poems — 
'The  Lotos-Eaters,'  'The  Palace  of  Art,'  and  'The 
Dream  of  Fair  Women' — reveals  a  similar  state  of 


THE  POEMS  OF  1842  411 

things.  All  these  had  been  derisively  mentioned  by 
Lockhart ;  but  the  extracts  from  them  were  few.  '  The 
Palace  of  Art'  was  thoroughly  recast  in  the  edition 
of  1842.  Not  merely  were  there  in  it  numerous  minor 
changes,  but  omissions,  additions,  and  transpositions 
took  place  on  a  grand  scale.  In  truth,  over  thirty 
stanzas  of  the  poem,  as  it  originally  appeared,  were 
discarded,  and  nearly  the  same  number  added.  One 
is  here  a  little  puzzled  by  Lockhart 's  calling  attention 
to  the  spelling  Petrarca  in  one  of  the  two  quotations 
taken  from  this  poem.  He  must  surely  have  known 
that  this  was  the  name  the  poet  bore  in  his  own  tongue. 
But  if  so,  why  italicize,  as  he  did,  the  form?  'The 
Dream  of  Fair  Women'  also  underwent  great  changes 
of  all  sorts  though  not  so  great  as  the  preceding  poem. 
But  in  all  of  these  pieces  not  a  single  alteration  can 
be  traced  even  "svith  probability,  still  less  with  cer- 
tainty, to  anything  found  in  the  review  in  the  'Quar- 
terly.' Tennyson,  in  truth,  could  hardly  have  sho^vn 
more  distinctly  his  opinion  of  Lockhart 's  opinion,  or 
rather  his  contempt  for  it,  than  by  his  treatment  of 
the  words  and  phrases  on  which  his  critic  had  sought 
to  cast  discredit  by  italicizing  them.  These  were 
almost  invariably  retained  even  when  occurring  in 
poems  in  which  numerous  alterations  of  all  sorts  had 
been  made. 

Furthermore,  phrases  or  passages  which  had  under- 
gone something  more  than  the  criticism  conveyed  by 
italics,  which  had  indeed  been  made  the  subject  of 
special  banter,  were  left  entirely  unchanged.  Two 
instances  there  are  in  the  last  two  poems  considered, 


412  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

on  which  Lockhart  laid  special  stress.  He  devoted  a 
paragraph  to  the  ridicule  of  the  phrase  ''babe  in  arm," 
which  occurred  in  the  description  of  the  Madonna  in 
'The  Palace  of  Art.'  This  he  compared  to  "lance  in 
rest,"  "sword  in  arm,"  and  spoke  of  it  ironically  as 
"a  deep  stroke  of  art."  The  respect  which  Tennyson 
showed  to  this  criticism  may  be  inferred  from  the  fact 
that  it  not  only  occurred  in  the  original  edition  but  is 
found  in  every  edition  since  down  to  the  day  of  his 
death.  Furthermore,  he  repeated  it  in  '  The  Princess. " 
Another  illustration  of  the  influence  of  the  re\dewer 
upon  the  poet  can  be  seen  in  the  remark  made  by  the 
former  upon  the  sacrifice  of  Iphigenia  and  in  the 
action  taken  by  the  latter.  Lockhart  quoted  from  '  The 
Dream  of  Fair  Women'  the  four  lines  follo^ving,  in 
which  certain  changes  were  made  by  him  in  the 
punctuation  to  accentuate  the  ironic  interpretation  of 
them  by  the  reviewer. 

The  tall  masts  quivered  as  they  lay  afloat; 

The  temples,  and  the  people,  and  the  shore ; 
One  drew  a  sharp  knife  through  my  tender  throat — 

Slowly, — and  nothing  more. 

"What  touching  simplicity — "  was  Lockhart 's  con- 
cluding comment  on  the  extract — "what  pathetic 
resignation — he  cut  my  throat — ^nothing  more!'  One 
might  indeed  ask,  'what  more'  she  would  have?"  Yet 
in  spite  of  this  criticism  the  stanza,  as  it  appeared  in 
the  edition  of  1832,  reappeared  unaltered  in  the  edition 
of  1842  and  in  every  edition  after  that  until  the  edition 

1  Canto  VI,  line  15. 


THE  POEMS  OF  1842  413 

of  1853.  Other  instances  might  be  cited.  Though 
less  significant  in  themselves,  they  constitute  collect- 
ively an  instructive  comment  on  the  accuracy  of 
Browning's  assertion  that  '4n  goes  this,  out  goes 
that,  all  is  changed  and  ranged"  at  the  bidding  of 
the  'Quarterly.' 

Undoubtedly  Tennyson,  like  every  other  author, 
made  alterations  at  the  suggestion  of  friends  or  in 
consequence  of  the  criticism  of  enemies.  At  times 
too  they  were  unfortunate.  In  the  poem  of  'Lady 
Clara  Vere  de  Vere'  the  first  line  of  the  couplet,  as  it 
originally  read,  ran  as  follows: 

The  grand  old  gardener  and  his  wife 
Smile  at  the  claims  of  long  descent. 

This  was  changed  in  very  late  editions  to  the  hope- 
lessly prosaic  line, 

The  gardener  Adam  and  his  wife. 

The  alteration  was  made,  we  are  told,  "because  of  the 
frequent  letters  from  friends  asking  me  for  expla- 
nation." Poetry  will  be  in  a  sorry  state  if  it  is  to 
be  revised  to  adapt  it  to  the  comprehension  of  the 
unthinking  and  unintelligent.  It  was  surely  hardly 
worth  while  to  change  a  fine  line  into  a  feeble  one 
to  accommodate  the  ignorance  of  men  who  had  not 
heard  of  the  garden  of  Eden.  Still  such  instances 
are  very  rare.  Enough  has  been  shown  to  prove 
beyond  question  that  Tennyson  was  not  influenced  in 
the  alterations  he  made  by  hostile  criticism,  however 
keenly  he  felt  it. 


414  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

It  is  also  easy  to  establish  beyond  cavil  the  truth 
of  the   further   assertion   that   he   was   uninfluenced 
by  friendly  criticism  when  it  came  in  conflict  with 
the    conclusions    of    his    own    judgment.      We    have 
seen  that  he   discarded   the   poem  of   'The   Lover's 
Tale'  from  the  volume  of  1832,  despite  the  entreaties 
of  the   one   friend  to   whom  he   was   most   attached 
and  in  whose  opinions  he  had  the  highest  confidence. 
Both  Hallam,  and  Thompson,  the  future  Master  of 
Trinity,    remonstrated    strongly    as    well    as    wisely 
against  the  epithet  of  ''madman"  applied  to  Bona- 
parte in  the  sonnet  so  entitled.     For  it  they  wished 
him  to  substitute  "dreamer."     But  their  wishes  and 
their   objections   had  no   weight  with   the   poet   and 
"madman"  was  retained.     The  sonnet  was  dropped 
from  the  edition  of  1842,  and  was  not  reprinted  by 
him  until  1872.     It  had  little  merit  and  represented 
mainly  what  Mill  termed  the  vulgar  pride  of  nation- 
ality in  which  Tennyson  was  always  too  much  inclined 
to  indulge.     Again,  while  John  Stuart  Mill's  review 
of  his  poems  had  paid  the  most  cordial  of  tributes 
to  the  genius  of  their  author,  he  had  not  hesitated  to 
condemn  several  of  the  individual  pieces  as  positive 
or  comparative  failures.     Those  censured  numbered 
seventeen  in  all,  though  most  of  them  were  very  short. 
When  the  edition  of  1842  appeared  six  of  the  seventeen 
censured  continued  to  be  retained. 

It  is  to  be  said  in  conclusion  that  no  inconsiderable 
number  of  the  early  pieces  not  included  in  the  volumes 
of  1842,  were  subsequently  inserted  by  Tennyson  in 
later  editions  of  the  poems  or  in  his  collected  works. 


THE  POEMS  OF  1842  415 

Still,  there  was  more  than  a  score  of  these  rejected 
pieces  that  he  himself  never  reprinted.  What  the 
reasons  were  in  individual  cases  which  led  to  their 
inclusion  or  exclusion  it  is  no  easy  matter  to  deter- 
mine. Certain  it  is  that  several  of  those  he  refused 
to  republish  will  seem  to  most  men  not  inferior  to 
many  of  those  to  which  he  gave  the  preference  and 
in  one  or  two  cases  distinctly  superior.  There  were 
men  among  his  early  admirers  who  did  not  take  kindly 
to  his  rejection  of  'The  Hesperides'  from  the  edition 
of  1842.  Yet  in  his  refusal  to  reprint  it  he  adhered 
all  his  life.  It  is  far  harder  to  understand  the  failure, 
already  mentioned,  to  include  the  poem  entitled  'Hero 
to  Leander. '    The  following  is  its  first  stanza : 

Oh  go  not  yet,  my  love, 

The  night  is  dark  and  vast; 
The  white  moon  is  hid  in  her  heaven  above, 

And  the  waves  climb  high  and  fast. 
Oh!  kiss  me,  kiss  me,  once  again, 

Lest  thy  kiss  should  be  the  last. 

Oh  kiss  me  ere  we  part ; 

Grow  closer  to  my  heart. 
My  heart  is  warmer  surely  than  the  bosom  of  the  main. 

This  is  undoubtedly  the  best  of  the  four  stanzas 
constituting  the  poem ;  but  the  others  are  good  enough 
to  make  the  whole  production  one  of  distinctly  higher 
grade  than  several  he  admitted  later  into  his  collected 
works. 


CHAPTER  XVI 

RECEPTION  OF   THE   POEMS   OF   1842 

Of  the  somewhat  remarkable  number  of  poetical 
works  which  came  out  in  1842,  it  has  already  been 
observed  that  the  two  volumes  of  Tennyson  are  to  us 
the  most  memorable.  It  is  now  frequently  said  that 
they  placed  him  at  the  head  of  contemporary  English 
poets.  So  far  as  their  ultimate  effect  is  concerned, 
the  assertion  is  correct.  But  in  some  quarters  the 
mistaken  belief  has  sprung  up  that  this  result  was 
accomplished  at  once.  Specifically  it  is  true  of  the 
effect  then  wrought  upon  a  limited  number,  and  that 
number,  too,  belonging  to  the  highest  class  of  minds. 
But  it  was  not  so  universally.  The  growth  of  Tenny- 
son's acceptance  by  the  public  can  be  easily  gauged 
by  the  difference  between  the  enormous  number  of 
copies  of  the  editions  printed  in  the  fifties  to  meet 
the  enormous  demand  which  had  come  to  prevail,  and 
the  comparatively  small  number  printed  in  the  forties, 
especially  in  the  early  forties.  In  the  latter  case  the 
sale  was  respectable  as  poetry  sold  then;  but  it  was 
by  no  means  remarkable.  The  first  edition  of  the 
'Poems'  of  1842  consisted  of  but  eight  hundred  copies. 
To  exhaust  this  number  took  more  than  a  year.  We 
can  get  a  fair  conception  of  the  modesty  of  the  antici- 
pations entertained  by  the  poet  himself  from  the  fact 


RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS  OF  1842  417 

that  nearly  four  months  after  the  publication,  he  was 
communicating  to  a  friend  with  a  certain  degree  of 
exultation  that  he  had  been  told  at  Moxon's  that  five 
hundred  copies  of  his  poems  had  been  sold/  That 
evidently  seemed  to  him  a  great  success.  The  second 
edition  which  appeared  in  the  middle  of  June,  1843, 
advanced  the  number  over  that  previously  printed  to 
one  thousand. 

But  though  the  constituency  behind  Tennyson  was 
not  at  first  large  in  numbers,  so  far  as  that  is  indicated 
by  the  sale  of  his  works,  it  was  remarkable  both  for 
its  character  and  its  intellect.  To  it  belonged  espe- 
cially the  young  men  of  promise  whose  opinions  were 
to  be  the  opinions  of  the  immediate  future.  One 
condition  of  things  soon  revealed  itself  which  was  to 
be  repeated  again  and  again  in  his  literary  career. 
The  truth  of  Aristotle's  dictum  that  the  mass  of  men — 
he  meant  of  course  men  cultivated  and  competent  to 
form  opinions  of  their  own — were  far  better  judges 
of  poetry  than  any  one  man  however  eminent,  has 
never  been  better  illustrated  than  in  the  reception 
given  to  Tennyson's  successive  works.  The  critical 
estimate  almost  invariably  lagged  behind  the  estimate 
reached  by  the  great  body  of  intelligent  readers. 
When  the  former  was  adverse — and  in  his  case  it  often 
was  adverse  on  the  first  publication  of  particular 
works — it  was  almost  disdainfully  set  aside  by  the 
latter.  Never  was  this  fact  brought  out  much  more 
distinctly  than  in  the  instance  of  the  'Poems'  of  1842 
and  'The  Princess'  of  1847.     Professional  criticism 

1  Letter  of  September  8,  1842,  in  'Memoir,'  Vol.  I,  p.  212. 


418  LIFE  AND  TBIES  OF  TENNYSON 

followed  and  followed  reluctantly,  and  almost  protest- 
ingly,  popular  appreciation.  Tennyson's  reputation 
advanced  against  a  sullen  opposition  which  insinuated 
a  depreciatory  estimate  which  at  last  it  did  not  venture 
to  proclaim  openly. 

It  cannot  be  made  too  strongly  emphatic  that  the 
success  which  Tennyson  achieved  during  his  whole 
career  was  never  achieved  by  the  aid  of  professional 
critics.  It  was  the  spontaneous  tribute  paid  by 
intelligent  and  independent  readers.  In  1842  the 
reviewer  of  poetry  hesitated;  not  so  the  lover  of  it. 
There  is  nothing  more  striking  in  the  history  of 
Victorian  literature  than  the  masterly  manner  in  which 
the  leading  critical  organs  of  that  particular  time,  and 
even  for  years  later,  refrained  from  committing  them- 
selves too  unreservedly  as  to  the  nature  and  degree 
of  Tennyson's  poetical  achievement.  They  seemed 
at  first  dazed  by  the  apparition  of  this  luminary,  which, 
so  long  in  obscuration,  had  suddenly  blazed  in  the 
literary  heavens  as  a  star  of  the  first  magnitude. 
There  were  none  who  expected  to  deal  in  unmixed 
praise.  There  were  some  prepared  to  scoff  and  ready 
to  prove  that  the  light  by  which  a  few  erring  souls 
appeared  to  be  dazzled  was  a  mere  meteoric  exhalation 
which  would  speedily  vanish  from  view.  But  it  soon 
became  apparent  that  the  temper  of  the  educated 
public  was  such  as  to  make  an  action  of  this  sort 
perilous.  Never  was  the  critical  fraternity  more  at  a 
loss  as  to  what  they  should  say,  or  rather  what  it  was 
safe  for  them  to  say.  It  took  the  large  majority  of 
them  a  good  deal  of  time  to  make  up  their  minds  what 


RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS  OF  1842  419 

to  do.  They  were  really  waiting  for  public  opinion 
to  declare  itself  unmistakably;  they  themselves  did 
not  attempt  to  lead  it.  This  refusal  on  their  part  to 
commit  themselves  unreservedly  was  remarked  at  the 
time  by  Fanny  Kemble  in  the  review,  already  men- 
tioned, which  she  wrote  of  the  edition  of  1842  for  an 
American  periodical.  "The  public,"  she  said,  ''has 
been  quicker  than  the  reviewers  in  appreciating  Mr. 
Tennyson's  merits." 

Only  two  of  the  leading  critical  weeklies  paid  any 
speedy  attention  to  the  work.  The  first  to  review  it 
was  'The  Examiner.'  Its  notice^  appeared  about  a 
fortnight  after  the  publication  of  the  volumes.  It  was 
undoubtedly  written  by  its  literary  editor,  John 
Forster.  His  article  was  in  general  commendatory, 
and  indeed  might  fairly  be  called  cordial.  Still  it 
exhibited  none  of  that  enthusiasm  of  appreciation  or 
rather  of  panegyric  which  he  had  previously  bestowed 
upon  Browning.  But  though  somewhat  colorless,  it 
was  discriminating;  it  praised  what  was  worthy  of 
praise  and  its  censure  was  given  to  pieces  which 
deserved  censure.  About  a  week  later  followed  in 
'The  Spectator'  the  only  other  early  notice  of  the 
work  in  a  periodical  of  importance.  It  was  manifestly 
too  early  for  the  reviewer  to  gain  any  acquaintance 
with  the  volumes  he  set  out  to  criticise.  He  labored 
under  the  impression  that  the  poems  contained  in 
them  were  little  more  than  a  reprint  of  what  appeared 
before.      "These    elegant   little    volumes,"    he    said, 

1' Examiner,'  May  28,  1842, 


420  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

"whose  contents  at  first  sight  appear  to  be  original, 
are  discerned  on  examination  to  be  a  corrected, 
re\dsed,  and  enlarged  edition  of  the  author's  Poems." 
Such  was  the  opening  sentence  in  which  he  recorded 
this  notable  discovery.  Still  he  felt  that  in  spite  of 
the  lack  of  novelty,  poetry  was  not  so  rife  in  the  land 
that  the  appearance  of  the  work  should  be  allowed  to 
pass  in  silence.  The  opinions  of  a  critic  who,  not 
content  with  the  possession  of  ignorance,  started  out 
with  the  proclamation  of  it,  were  not  likely  to  be 
marked  by  any  originality  of  treatment.  Naturally 
he  rehashed  the  stale  comment  on  the  two  previous 
volumes  which  had  long  come  to  serve  as  a  means  for 
saving  the  reviewer  from  the  necessity  of  using  his 
own  brains.  But  as  one  of  apparently  only  two  critics 
who  has  reckoned  *  The  Skipping  Rope '  among  Tenny- 
son's  better  pieces,  his  notice  deserves  full  recognition. 
''Among  the  elite  of  the  volumes,"  he  wrote,  *'may 
be  reckoned  most  of  the  poems  in  the  nature  of  ballads 
or  pastorals — for  Tennyson  is  strongest  upon  old  or 
rustic  English  grounds ;  a  few  of  the  lighter  personal 
poems,  as  The  Skipping  Rope,  and  some  not  reducible 
to  any  class,  as  The  Talking  Oak.  The  gem  of  the 
whole  for  variety,  delicate  perception  of  character, 
rustic  grace,  spirit  and  pathos,  is  the  pastoral  tale 
embraced  in  The  May  Queen  and  its  two  sequels. ' ' 

These  two  notices  remained  for  a  long  time  the  only 
ones  which  appeared  in  any  periodical  of  distinct 
repute.  There  was  for  a  while  indeed  a  somewhat 
ominous  silence  in  most  of  the  leading  organs  of 
critical  opinion.    ''As  to  Alfred's  book,"  wrote  Fitz- 


RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS  OF  1842  421 

Gerald  to  Frederick  Tennyson  on  the  sixteenth  of 
August,  * '  I  believe  it  has  sold  well :  but  I  have  not  seen 
him  for  a  long  while,  and  have  had  no  means  of  hearing 
about  the  matter  except  from  Thompson,  who  told  me 
that  very  many  copies  had  been  sold  at  Cambridge, 
which  indeed  will  be  the  chief  market  for  them. 
Neither  have  I  seen  any  notice  of  them  in  print  except 
that  in  the  Examiner;  and  that  seemed  so  quiet  that 
I  scarce  supposed  it  was  by  Forster."^  This  was 
written,  as  is  seen,  three  months  after  the  publication 
of  the  poems.  Even  then  one  of  the  warmest  admirers 
of  the  author  fancied  that  the  chief  market  for  them 
would  be  in  Cambridge.  It  is  clear  that  at  that  period 
no  expectation  was  entertained  of  the  success  which 
the  work  was  to  have.  This  feeling  existed,  too,  in 
spite  of  the  fact  that  individual  poems  even  then  were 
gaining  wide  currency  through  the  agency  of  the 
newspaper  press. 

Cambridge,  however,  failed  to  fulfil  FitzGerald's 
prophecy  of  continuing  to  be  the  chief  market  for  the 
sale  of  the  poems.  It  shows  indeed  how  far  from 
general  had  been  Tennyson's  previous  repute  that 
he  was  hardly  known  at  all  at  the  sister  university 
during  the  ten  years  of  silence.  Bradley,  the  dean 
of  Westminster,  tells  us  that  previous  to  the  publica- 
tion of  the  edition  of  1842,  the  men  of  whom  they 
talked  at  Oxford  were  Keble,  Shelley,  Byron,  and 
Wordsworth.-  But  all  this  was  speedily  reversed 
after  the  appearance  of  the  Tennyson  volumes.     It 


1  'Letters  and  Literary  Remains'  of  Edward  FitzGerald,  Vol.  I,  p 
2 'Memoir,'  Vol.  I,  p.  206. 


98. 


422  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

was  mainly  his  poetry  that  then  came  up  for  consid- 
eration and  discussion.  It  took  the  university  by 
storm.  The  change  was  significant  of  the  sentiment 
prevailing  everywhere  among  the  young  and  highly 
educated.  They  celebrated  Tennyson  in  season  and 
out  of  season  not  as  the  great  coming  poet  but  as 
the  poet  who  had  come.  The  fervency  of  admiration 
expressed  by  them — it  is  largely  reflected  in  the 
correspondence  of  the  period,  so  far  as  it  has  been 
published — was  in  striking  contrast  to  the  frequently 
indifferent,  usually  patronizing,  and  occasionally 
hostile  attitude  of  the  critical  press.  Against  the 
cool  tone  of  the  re^dews  was  the  ardent  appreciation 
of  the  general  public.  That  indeed  had  found  out  the 
greatness  of  the  poet  long  before  it  dawned  upon  the 
consciousness  of  its  self -constituted  literary  advisers. 
Men  in  general  who  did  not  feel  that  they  had  any 
reputation  at  stake  for  critical  perspicacity  expressed 
their  admiration  unhesitatingly  and  enthusiastically. 
Single  poems  from  the  work  and  extracts  of  poems 
were  circulating  far  and  wide.  Hence  they  were  early 
made  known  to  the  reading  public  out  of  all  propor- 
tion to  the  sale  of  the  work  itself.  The  praise  of 
critics  was  little  needed;  their  blame  was  certainly 
little  regarded.  Even  before  FitzGerald  had  written 
the  letter  just  quoted,  another  one  of  the  periodicals, 
with  a  reputation  to  take  care  of,  had  mustered  up 
sufficient  courage  to  express  a  measured  approbation 
without  danger  of  destroying  its  own  reputation  for 
discriminating  sobriety  of  judgment. 

This  periodical  was  '  The  Athenaeum. '    On  August  6, 


RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS  OF  1842  423 

a  review  of  the  work  appeared  in  its  columns.  It  was 
favorable  on  the  whole,  though  the  critic  was  careful 
to  maintain  a  proper  decorum  by  not  expressing  any 
wild  enthusiasm.  It  expressed  the  usual  regret  at  the 
interpolations  and  alterations  which  had  been  made 
in  the  contents  of  the  previous  volumes  and  at  the 
omission  of  certain  poems  which  they  had  contained. 
It  would,  it  declared,  have  retained  the  lines  to 
Christopher  North  in  spite  of  their  pertness  and  the 
'Darling  Room'  in  spite  of  its  puerility  rather  than 
have  lost  'The  Deserted  House.'  It  was  obliged 
further  to  dissent  from  the  opinion  of  those  who 
praised  the  poet  as  having  emancipated  himself  from 
the  crotchets  which  distinguished  his  earlier  efforts. 
His  newer  offerings  supplied  as  many  as  those  he  had 
expunged.  This  was  doubtless  aimed  at  the  notice  in 
'The  Examiner.'  With  the  other  likes  and  dislikes 
conveyed  in  the  article,  it  is  not  worth  while  to  dally. 
The  general  conclusion  is  all  that  needs  to  be  given. 
With  the  various  critical  abatements  to  Tennyson's 
genius  which  the  reviewer's  strict  sense  of  justice 
compelled  him  to  make,  he  nevertheless  felt  justified 
in  asserting  that  the  extracts  from  the  volumes  sub- 
stantiated the  writer's  claim  to  a  high  place  among 
modern  poets.  To  a  high  place  among  modern  poets 
was  the  result  reached  by  this  thoughtful  critic  after 
three  months  of  time  and  apparently  of  some  moments 
of  reflection.  Incidentally  however  he  made  one  most 
significant  admission.  Everything  which  he  had  said, 
he  remarked,  had  been  already  anticipated.  His  work 
was  largely  one  of  supererogation;  he  could  do  no 


424  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

more  than  furnish  additional  evidence.  **  Though  we 
are  late  in  noticing  Mr.  Tennyson's  new  volume,"  he 
observed,  ''neither  critics,  readers,  nor  author  will 
suffer  from  our  delay  or  self-denial.  Large  as  have 
been  the  quotations  of  our  contemporaries,  they  have 
left  still  a  treasury  unrifled!"  But  the  reason  given 
for  one  of  his  omissions  is  noticeable  as  showing  how 
rapidly  popular  appreciation  had  outrun  critical. 
Not  a  line  was  quoted  from  'Locksley  Hall'  and  one 
or  two  other  poems.  That  course  was  avowedly  taken 
on  the  ground  that  they  were  already  familiar  to 
every  one. 

The  critic  of  'The  Athenaeum'  was  Chorley/  The 
re\dew  in  the  other  literary  weekly — 'The  Literary 
Gazette, '  now  fully  entered  upon  its  downward  road — ■ 
did  not  appear  until  the  nineteenth  of  November.  It 
had  taken  it  six  months  to  make  up  what  it  deemed 
its  mind.  Six  minutes  would  have  been  ample  for  the 
result  it  reached.  This  review  must  be  described  as 
not  only  ridiculous  in  itself — that  might  be  expected 
from  our  knowledge  of  the  editor,  who  in  this  case 
was  very  certainly  the  writer  of  the  criticism — but  as 
being  under  the  circumstances  a  peculiarly  impudent 
performance  coming  from  a  man  who  had  devoted 
several  columns  to  depreciation  of  the  volume  of  1832 
with  as  much  severity  as  his  limited  intellectual  powers 
would  permit.  'The  Literary  Gazette'  would  have 
been  glad  to  attack  the  work  unreservedly;  it  lacked 
the  courage.    Most  of  its  article  was  given  up  to  the 

1  'Henry  Fothergill  Chorley,'  by  H.  G.  Hewlett,  1873,  Vol.  II,  p.  2. 


RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS  OF  1842  425 

task  of  finding  fault — which  had  now  begun  to  grow 
wearisome — with  the  changes  which  had  been  made 
in  the  poems  as  previously  printed.  It  expressed 
regret  for  the  disappearance  of  some  pieces  and  for 
the  alterations  in  others  which  years  before  had  been 
furiously  assailed  by  the  same  writer  in  the  same 
periodical.  Hardly  a  word  was  said  about  the  contents 
of  the  second  volume  beyond  the  assertion  that  it 
contained  many  new  beauties.  The  only  value  the 
review  has  is  the  reluctant  e\T.dence  it  bears  to  the 
place  which  Tennyson  had  now  begun  to  occupy  in 
the  public  estimation. 

Jerdan  's  connection  with  *  The  Literary  Gazette '  did 
not  cease  until  1850.  He  was,  however,  beginning 
already  to  be  "the  time-worn  but  not  reverend  indi- 
vidual" who  called  upon  Hawthorne  just  as  the 
novelist  chanced  to  be  reading,  ''between  asleep 
and  awake,"  what  he  justly  termed  the  "wretched 
twaddle"  of  his  visitor's  autobiography.  It  is  a 
singularly  suggestive  tribute  to  the  advantages  of 
anonymousness  that  this  "disreputable  senior,"  as 
Ha^vthorne  styled  him,  should  for  a  long  period  of 
years  have  held  a  commanding  position  in  critical 
literature.  He  had  come  in  consequence  to  believe 
that  great  weight  was  to  be  attached  to  his  opinion. 
There  was  a  delicious  impertinence  in  this  fat-"VYitted 
writer  setting  out  to  patronize  Tennyson  as  he  did  in 
this  review.  He  conceded  that  he  was  a  "true  and 
sterling  poet."  That  was  all  the  more  reason  for 
subjecting  him  to  discipline.  We  love  him,  he  wrote, 
"just  well  enough  to  'chasten  him'  for  his  faults,  as 


426  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

we  have  done  before  time; — and  shall  continue  so  to 
do,  until  he  leaves  off  his  evil  practices."  There  was 
a  fine  affectation  of  friendliness  in  assuring  the  poet 
how  many  of  his  critics  had  *'in  the  kindest  manner" 
taken  pains  to  point  out  "the  unsightly  blots  with 
which  he  had  disfigured  his  pages."  "We  may  be 
wrong,"  he  concluded,  "in  ranking  him  among  the 
foremost  of  our  young  poets,  as  one  whose  step  is  near 
that  throne  which  must  ere  long  be  vacant ;  and  whose 
own  fault  it  will  be  if  he  misses  the  crown  to  which 
he  is  *  heir-apparent. '  "  The  critic  doubtless  meant 
heir  presumptive.  "For,"  he  added  with  fine  critical 
impartiality,  "there  are  others  who,  with  steady  eye 
and  firm  hand  are  slowly  hewing  their  way  to  the  same 
height. '  '^ 

Nevertheless  it  gives  from  another  point  of  view 
an  idea  of  the  little  importance  that  Tennyson  still 
had  in  the  eyes  of  a  large  portion  of  the  public  that 
no  reviev/  of  the  'Poems'  of  1842  appeared  in  one  of 
the  three  leading  politico-literary  weeklies  which  were 
then  in  existence.  This  was  'The  Atlas,'  held  by 
many  to  be  the  ablest  of  all.  On  the  other  hand,  it 
may  be  regarded  as  proof  of  the  impression  which 
Tennyson  had  made  upon  a  large  portion  of  the 
public  and  the  importance  he  had  suddenly  assumed 
in  its  eyes  that  the  quarterlies  no  longer  deemed  it 
inconsistent  with  their  dignity,  but  actually  felt  it 
incumbent  on  their  position  to  devote  special  articles 
to  the  review  of  his  poems.  In  each  case,  too,  the 
work  of  criticism  was  entrusted  to  some  one  connected 

1 '  Literary  Gazette, '  November  19,  p.  788. 


RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS  OF  1842  427 

with  the  author  by  ties  of  near  or  remote  personal 
acquaintance.  This  indeed  was  not  a  proceeding 
which  tended  to  produce  an  undue  estimate  of  his 
achievement.  In  no  case  did  the  enthusiasm  of  friend- 
ship w^anton  into  extravagant  eulogy.  Perhaps  in  no 
case  was  it  permitted  to  do  so.  In  truth,  in  reading 
these  criticisms,  one  is  reminded  of  the  remark  of 
Rogers  that  if  you  wish  to  have  your  works  coldly 
reviewed,  get  your  intimate  friend  to  write  an  article 
upon  them. 

Three  reviews  there  were  which  appeared  in  periodi- 
cals of  this  class  during  the  year  1842.  These  were 
the  work  of  John  Sterling,  of  Richard  Monckton 
Milnes,  and  of  Leigh  Hunt.  They  came  out  respect- 
ively in  the  'Quarterly,'  the  'Westminster,'  and  the 
'Church  of  England  Quarterly.'  The  first  to  appear 
was  that  of  John  Sterling.  This  was  published  in 
the  number  for  September.  We  have  been  frequently 
told  that  this  periodical  made  amends  for  its  con- 
temptuous attack  upon  the  volume  of  1832  by  the 
appreciative  criticism  which  it  now  published.  For 
this  very  reason  it  has  been  made  a  subject  of  exceed- 
ingly laudatory  mention,  especially  by  those  who  have 
manifestly  never  read  it.  It  could  not  indeed  have 
been  an  altogether  grateful  thing  to  Lockhart  to  open 
the  'Quarterly'  to  a  friendly  review  of  the  work  of 
the  man  whose  reputation  he  had  set  out  years  before 
to  demolish  and  which  for  a  time  it  was  believed  by 
many  that  he  had  demolished.  The  dose  must  have 
been  a  bitter  one  to  swallow.  Still,  as  it  apparently 
had  to  be  taken,  it  was  made  as  palatable  as  possible 


428  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

to  the  patient.  Lockhart  has  constantly  been  praised 
for  his  generosity  in  admitting  to  the  columns  of  the 
periodical  over  which  he  presided  this  thoughtful  and 
favorable  article,  as  it  has  been  termed.  To  neither 
of  the  two  epithets  is  it  really  entitled. 

Thoughtful  certainly  is  one  of  the  most  inappro- 
priate of  words  with  which  to  describe  it.  On  the 
contrary,  with  an  appearance  of  profundity,  it  is 
really  shallow.  Its  author  owes  to  friends  a  reputation 
which  it  would  not  have  been  in  his  own  power  to 
acquire.  His  memory  has  been  consecrated  to  pos- 
terity by  the  pen  of  a  man  of  genius.  Shortly  before 
this  period  his  name,  as  we  shall  see  later,  had  been 
solemnly  placed  in  the  limited  roll  of  true  English 
poets  by  one  of  the  most  influential  critics  of  the  age, 
if  not  then  its  most  influential  critic.  Tennyson  him- 
self had  been  asked  by  implication  to  equal  him  if 
he  could.  From  Sterling,  indeed,  great  things  had 
been  anticipated  from  the  outset.  He  was  to  a  marked 
degree  a  representative  of  that  not  infrequent  type 
of  men  whose  spoken  words  produce  an  impression 
which  is  never  borne  out  by  their  written.  They  some- 
how convey  the  idea  that  they  are  going  to  accomplish 
something  remarkable,  but  never  actually  accomplish 
anything  worthy  of  particular  mention.  There  is  no 
question  as  to  the  charm  of  Sterling's  personal 
presence  and  the  belief  in  the  greatness  of  his  ability 
which  he  inspired.  It  affected  many  of  the  most 
eminent  of  his  contemporaries,  perhaps  all  of  them 
who  came  mthin  the  sound  of  his  voice.  It  is  the 
written  word  that  fails.    When  he  set  out  to  commu- 


RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS  OF  1842  429 

nicate  to  the  reader  what  had  so  charmed  the  hearer, 
the  beauty  of  it  and  the  effectiveness  of  it  somehow 
vanished.  Hence  the  inability  of  the  men  who  did  not 
know  him  to  understand  the  enthusiasm  of  those  who 
did.  Hence  his  owti  failure  in  life.  He  died  compara- 
tively young.  Still  when  he  died,  he  had  lived  long 
enough  to  demonstrate  that  his  performance  would 
always  lag  far  behind  his  promise.  He  never  produced 
a  single  work  which  contemporaries  cared  to  cherish, 
still  less  posterity.  Sterling's  writings,  in  truth,  show 
that  the  highest  rank  he  could  ever  have  hoped  to 
attain  would  have  been  that  of  a  'Quarterly'  reviewer; 
and  his  poetry  belongs  to  that  ephemeral  class  of 
pieces  which  live  their  short  life  in  the  pages  of 
magazines. 

Nowhere  does  his  real  lack  of  critical  insight  display 
itself  more  distinctly  than  in  many  parts  of  this 
particular  review.  Much  of  it  was  taken  up  with  a 
general  discussion  of  poetry  which  had  no  more  to  do 
with  Tennyson's  than  with  that  of  any  other  writer. 
Indeed  it  seemed  to  be  with  difficulty  that  Sterling 
refrained  from  giving  up  the  whole  of  his  article  to  a 
criticism  of  Wordsworth  as  he  did  a  portion  of  it. 
Much  of  it,  too,  was  devoted  to  those  poems  of  Tenny- 
son which  had  been  long  before  the  public.  About 
these  comparatively  brief  mention  would  seem  to  have 
been  all  that  was  required.  Still,  with  these  Sterling 
had  had  time  to  make  himself  familiar ;  and  it  is  about 
them  generally  that  his  critical  opinion  was  happiest 
and  most  worthy  of  consideration.  For  one  thing  in 
particular  we  may  be  thankful.     He  refrained  from 


430  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

echoing  the  cuckoo  cry  which  had  been  going  on  of 
deploring  the  alterations  which  had  been  made  in  the 
poems  previously  published.  In  general  he  com- 
mended these  changes.  He  found  fault  with  several 
of  these  early  pieces,  especially  those  headed  with 
the  names  of  women.  They  were,  as  he  expressed  it, 
mere  ''moonshine  maidens."  Others  of  them  are 
cavalierly — and  as  it  seems  to  me  rightfully — disposed 
of  as  good  enough  for  publication  but  not  good  enough 
to  spend  upon  them  detailed  criticism.  But  one  bad 
slip  there  was  in  his  criticism  of  these  early  poems. 
This  was  the  utterly  inadequate,  not  to  say  absurd 
notice  he  gave  of  the  'Ode  to  Memory,'  which  had 
excited,  in  particular,  the  warmest  praise  of  Wilson. 
Sterling  concluded  his  remarks  upon  it  with  quoting 
its  six  final  lines.  These  in  his  opinion  exhibited 
Tennyson's  unfitness  for  the  production  of  what  he 
called  "Orphic  song,"  whatever  he  meant  by  that 
Orphic  utterance.  "Philosophy,"  he  wrote,  "that 
sounds  all  depths,  has  seldom  approached  a  deeper 
bathos."  No  other  word  could  have  given  a  truer 
idea  not  of  the  poem,  but  of  his  criticism  of  it. 

One  further  merit  Sterling's  article  had.  He 
recognized  the  great  advance  which  had  been  made  by 
the  poet  as  shown  in  the  pieces  constituting  the  second 
volume.  For  many  of  them — especially  the  'Idylls' — 
he  had  unqualified  praise.  'The  Gardener's  Daugh- 
ter,' 'Dora,'  and  'Locksley  Hall,'  he  specially  singled 
out  for  eulogium.  But  along  with  the  lavish  commen- 
dation of  certain  poems  went  some  of  the  most 
extraordinary   judgments    about    others    which    ever 


EECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS  OF  1842         431 

found  their  way  into  print  from  a  reputable  quarter. 
It  seems  so  hard  to  believe  that  they  could  have  come 
from  the  pen  of  a  friend  and  admirer,  that  one  is 
tempted  to  suspect  that  the  language  underwent  more 
or  less  of  modification  at  the  hands  of  the  editor. 
There  is  in  truth  a  singular  tone  throughout  the  whole 
review.  Few  poems  that  are  praised  are  praised 
without  a  qualification.  Such  a  piece  was  well;  but 
it  might  have  been  so  much  better ;  or  it  was  inferior 
to  something  that  somebody  else  had  written.  In 
truth,  the  curious  inaptitude — almost  partaking  of  the 
nature  of  ineptitude — to  penetrate  into  the  poet's 
meaning,  which  had  been  exhibited  in  the  remark 
previously  quoted  upon  'St.  Agnes,'  was  frequently 
manifested  here  on  a  grand  scale.  Sterling  praised 
'Ulysses'  highly.  But  why,  he  asked,  should  not  the 
poem  have  been  written  instead  upon  some  one  of  the 
great  modern  voyagers,  like  Columbus,  Gama,  or  even 
Drake?  Why  should  it  not  indeed?  The  man  who 
does  not  feel  the  absolute  inappropriateness  of  any 
such  substitution  can  hardly  be  expected  to  be  made 
to  see  it  by  any  process  of  reasoning. 

To  'Godiva'  Sterling  also  took  exception.  Admirably 
well  done  he  admitted  it  to  be;  but  the  singularity 
and  barbarousness  of  the  fact  related  did  not  make  it 
fit  to  be  told  in  verse.  The  same  feeling  was  even 
more  strongly  expressed  about  'St.  Simeon  Stylites.' 
The  subject,  we  were  assured,  was  entirely  inappro- 
priate for  poetry.  "She  has  better  tasks,"  said  the 
critic,  "than  to  wrap  her  mantle  round  a  sordid, 
greedy  lunatic."     There  are  expressions  of  opinion 


432  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

even  more  singular  than  these.  'The  Palace  of  Art' 
was  *'a  many-colored  mistake."  'The  Two  Voices' 
was  a  long  and  dull  production,  a  dispute  on  immor- 
tality which  added  nothing  to  our  previous  knowl- 
edge— of  which  Sterling  had  apparently  a  good  deal — ■ 
and  which  in  substance  might  better  have  been  given 
in  three  pages,  or  rather  in  one,  than  in  thirty.  The 
Moralities,  indeed,  as  he  called  the  poems  of  this 
nature,  almost  all  appeared  to  him  as  decided  and 
remarkable  failures.  He  had  further  a  rather  poor 
opinion  of  the  'Morte  d 'Arthur. '  It  is  a  further 
illustration  of  Tennyson's  sensitiveness  to  criticism 
that  he  told  his  friend  AUingham  twenty-five  years 
later  that  he  had  been  prevented  from  doing  his  Arthur 
epic  in  twelve  books  by  this  silly  criticism  of  Sterling. 
*'I  had  it  all  in  my  mind,"  he  said,  ''could  have  done 
it  without  any  trouble.  The  King  is  the  complete  man, 
the  Knights  are  the  passions."^  Nor  was  Sterling 
altogether  satisfied  with  'The  Talking  Oak.'  "An 
ancient  oak,"  he  sagely  observed,  "that  is  won  by  a 
poet  to  utter  its  Dodonsean  oracles,  would  hardly,  we 
conceive,  be  so  prolix  and  minute  in  its  responses." 

The  specimens  of  Sterling's  criticisms  have  been 
given  here  on  a  somewhat  large  scale  because  this 
article  has  been  usually  spoken  of  as  a  specially  favor- 
able review  of  the  '  Poems '  of  1842.  It  has  been  further 
characterized  as  an  amende  honorable  on  the  part  of 
Lockhart.  To  neither  of  these  characterizations  has 
it  any  real  claim.  By  its  contrast  with  the  previous 
review  in  the  'Quarterly'  it  may  be  called  favorable. 

1  William  AUingham 's  'Diary,'  1907,  under  1867,  p.  150, 


RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS  OF  1842  433 

It  is  perhaps  as  cordial  a  criticism  as  could  be  expected 
from  the  mau  who  had  failed  over  the  man  who  had 
succeeded ;  but  it  was  not  really  cordial.  Still  by  way 
of  contrast,  it  made  a  good  deal  of  an  impression  upon 
the  popular  mind;  for  the  wonder  was  that  anything 
save  disparagement  could  come  from  the  quarter  in 
which  it  appeared.  Its  grudging  praise  was  accord- 
ingly exalted  into  panegyric.  To  be  sure,  the  effect 
of  the  many  individual  censures  was  to  some  extent 
counteracted  by  frequent  commendation  of  the  work 
as  a  whole.  But  particulars  always  make  more 
impression  than  generals;  and  in  spite  of  the  praise 
lavished  in  a  loose  way  upon  the  poet,  it  is  doubtful 
if  the  article  in  question,  if  taken  by  itself,  would  have 
done  as  much  towards  extending  Tennyson's  reputa- 
tion with  the  public  as  a  whole,  as  it  would  towards 
detracting  from  it  in  the  minds  of  those  whose  knowl- 
edge of  him  was  limited  entirely  to  what  was  here 
said.  Much  indeed  of  the  special  criticism  contained 
in  it  could  hardly  have  come  from  a  mind  that  was 
not  in  many  ways  essentially  prosaic.  For  him,  too, 
who  is  disposed  to  rely  upon  the  opinion  of  others  for 
his  own  literary  opinions,  there  is  something  startling 
in  the  contrast  presented  here  of  the  estimate  taken 
by  Sterling  on  particular  pieces  and  those  expressed 
a  little  later  by  Fanny  Kemble  in  her  previously 
mentioned  review  of  these  poems.  In  her  eyes  'The 
Talking  Oak'  was  a  "work  of  absolute  perfection." 
"It  is  faultless,"  she  added.  Furthermore  'The  Two 
Voices'  is  described  as  "Mr.  Tennyson's  finest  poem."^ 

1' Democratic  Eeview,'  January,  1844,  p.  77. 


434  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

Nor  was  the  review  which  followed  in  the  *  West- 
minster' for  October  of  an  enthusiastic  character, 
though  it  was  the  work  of  a  personal  friend,  Richard 
Monckton  Milnes,  and  was  signed  with  his  initials. 
It  is  indeed  far  warmer  in  its  praise  than  the  article 
in  the  'Quarterly.'  Still  it  is  slight  in  texture  and 
character,  though  we  may  be  thankful  that,  unlike 
Sterling's  review,  it  did  not  affect  a  profundity  which 
it  did  not  possess.  Its  insufficiency  appears  perhaps 
more  glaring  to  us  because  of  its  inferiority  in  appre- 
ciation and  insight  to  the  already  mentioned  article 
of  John  Stuart  Mill  which  had  appeared  years  before 
in  the  periodical  with  which  the  *  Westminster '  had 
been  united.  One  or  two  peculiar  specimens  of 
Milnes 's  criticisms  may  be  worth  citing.  He  would 
like  to  have  had  *St.  Simeon  Stylites'  out  of  the 
volume.  He  also  thought  'The  Talking  Oak'  some- 
what too  long — a  difficulty  which  lapse  of  time  seems 
to  have  removed  entirely.  The  review  is,  however, 
more  especially  noteworthy  to  us  now  for  the  little 
expectation  of  the  success  of  the  venture  that  was 
entertained  among  the  author's  closest  friends.  "Mr. 
Tennyson's  poems,"  wrote  Milnes,  "will,  we  doubt 
not,  obtain  such  attention  as  the  circumstances  of  the 
time  permit  to  be  given  to  poetry."  In  this  equivocal 
prognostic  once  more  appears  that  then  prevalent 
distrust  of  the  success  of  any  production  in  the  form 
of  verse,  of  which  there  has  already  been  so  frequent 
occasion  to  give  illustration. 

Of  the  reviews  which  appeared  in  the  quarterlies 
of  this  year,  the  poorest  in  all  respects  was  that  by 


RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS  OF  1842  435 

Leigh  Hunt.'  During  his  career,  Hunt  had  been  made 
the  subject  of  a  good  deal  of  silly  and  occasionally 
of  malignant  criticism.  But  he  was  never  the  recipient 
of  more  of  the  former  variety  than  he  himself  con- 
tributed on  this  occasion.  He  went  so  far  as  to  repeat 
the  old  rigmarole  about  Tennyson's  affectations,  his 
use  of  hyphens  and  other  assumed  peculiarities. 
These,  men  of  sense  were  now  beginning  to  leave  to 
fifth-rate  critics,  by  whom  they  regularly  continued 
to  be  reproduced  for  years  to  come.  Hunt  reproached 
Tennyson  for  having  left  out  some  of  his  second 
and  third  best  productions  while  retaining  most  of 
those  peculiarly  objectionable.  Consequently  his  first 
volume  constituted  neither  an  entire  collection  nor 
a  thoroughly  satisfactory  selection.  He  furthermore 
did  not  recognize  any  advancement  in  the  new  volume 
upon  the  best  to  be  found  in  the  former  two,  though 
he  conceded  that  there  was  negative  improvement  ' '  in 
the  articles  of  fantasticism  and  whimsicality."  His 
favorite  was  'The  Two  Voices,'  the  production  which 
Sterling  had  found  unnecessarily  long  and  unreason- 
ably dull.  This  Hunt  was  at  first  disposed  to  think 
proved  an  advance.  On  looking  closer,  however,  he 
discovered  that  1833  was  given  as  the  date  of  its 
composition.  He  was  consequently  denied  the  con- 
solation of  belief  in  the  poet's  progress.  He  thought 
it  would  be  well  for  him  to  get  out  a  new  volume  which 
if  less  in  bulk  would  have  a  greater  real  abundance. 
*  *  He  is  a  genuine  poet  in  his  degree, ' '  was  the  opinion 

I'The  Church  of  England  Quarterly  Review,'  Vol.  XII,  pp.  361-376. 


436  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

with  which  he  concluded.  It  is  manifest  from  the 
whole  article  that  ''his  degree"  was  not  a  high  one 
in  Hunt's  estimation,  apparently  not  so  high  as  his 
own.  Certain  it  is  from  some  of  his  later  utterances 
that  it  took  him  a  long  time  to  learn  that  Tennyson 
was  a  greater  poet  than  himself.  Perhaps  he  never 
came  to  understand  how  much  greater  a  one  he 
was,  though  he  must  have  become  aware  before  his 
death  that  the  belief  of  that  sort  met  with  universal 
acceptance. 

The  'Edinburgh'  was  the  last  of  the  great  quarter- 
lies to  review  the  work,.  Its  notice  did  not  appear 
until  1843  in  the  number  for  April,  which  came  out 
in  the  middle  of  that  month.  At  the  time  the  second 
edition  of  the  'Poems'  was  going  to  press.  The 
criticism  had  been  delayed  by  the  absence  of  its  author, 
James  Spedding,  who  during  several  months  of  1842 
was  in  America.  As  soon  as  the  negotiations  for 
the  treaty  of  Washington  were  completed,  Spedding 
returned.  His  article  was  more  outspoken  in  the 
praise  of  the  work  than  any  one  of  the  others  which 
had  appeared  in  the  quarterlies.  It  was,  in  truth, 
as  enthusiastic  as  it  was  allowed  to  be;  but  it  was 
not  allowed  to  be  too  enthusiastic.  From  the  editor, 
Macvey  Napier,  Spedding  had  obtained  leave  to  review 
the  'Poems.'  But  coupled  with  this  consent  was  the 
condition  that  he  would  not  seek  to  commit  the  periodi- 
cal to  a  too  undue  estimate  of  what  the  author  had 
already  accomplished  or  to  any  prophecies  as  to  what 
he  might  yet  be  expected  to  accomplish.  The  reputa- 
tion of  the  "Review"  must  be  preserved  at  all  hazards. 


RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS  OF  1842  437 

Cordial,  therefore,  as  was  Ms  criticism  in  comparison 
with  those  found  in  the  other  quarterlies,  it  was  not 
permitted  to  be  too  cordial.  Spedding  had  promised 
to  be  good,  and  earnestly  tried  to  be  good.  But  with  all 
his  self-restraint  he  found  that  in  one  instance  he  had 
gone  too  far.  A  sentence  in  the  concluding  paragraph 
of  his  article,  as  originally  written,  underwent  at  the 
chastening  hand  of  the  editor,  an  alteration  ''slight 
in  itself"  he  said,  ''but  considerable  in  effect  and 
significance."  "Powers  are  displayed  in  these  vol- 
umes," he  had  written,  "adequate  to  the  production 
of  a  very  great  work."  This  sentence  w^as  modified 
to  read  "Powers  are  displayed  in  these  volumes, 
adequate,  if  we  do  not  deceive  ourselves,  to  the  pro- 
duction of  a  great  work."  The  change  was  hardly 
worth  making  or  worth  noticing  when  made.  When, 
however,  Spedding  came  to  republish  this  article  in 
1879  in  his  volume  of  'Essays  and  Discourses,'  he 
restored  the  original  reading,  the  reputation  of  the 
"Review"  being  no  longer  at  stake  by  the  adoption  of 
this  course. 

It  is  clear  that  in  writing  this  article  Spedding  had 
had  in  mind  certain  criticisms  which  charged  the  poet 
with  the  extravagances  which  in  the  view  of  some  had 
disfigured  the  early  poems.  To  a  certain  extent  there 
was  foundation  for  an  accusation  of  the  sort.  From 
the  very  outset  there  were  pieces  contained  in  the 
edition  of  1842  against  the  insertion  of  which  his 
strongest  friends  had  protested.  Their  remonstrances 
had  no  effect  upon  the  man  who  has  been  held  up  to 
us  as  altering  or  omitting  lines  and  passages  to  suit 


438  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

the  views  of  hostile  critics.  There  was  unquestionably 
justification  for  this  attitude  in  regard  to  certain 
productions.  Especially  was  it  true  of  those  written 
in  a  lighter  vein.  While  Tennyson,  rarely  as  he  chose 
to  resort  to  it,  had  the  power  of  producing  trenchant 
satire,  there  was  never  a  great  poet  more  unfitted  than 
he  for  the  composition  of  those  elegant  trifles  which 
go  mth  us  under  the  foreign  title  of  vers  de  societe. 
He  could  not  write  his  best  save  under  the  pressure  of 
deep  feeling.  It  was  consequently  no  personal  hos- 
tility which  dictated  the  condemnation  of  certain 
pieces  wliich  he  persisted  in  retaining.  "I  agree  with 
you,"  wrote  FitzGerald  to  Pollock,  on  May  22,  1842, 
' '  quite  about  the  skipping-rope,  &c.  But  the  bald  men 
of  the  Embassy  would  tell  you  otherwise.  I  should 
not  wonder  if  the  whole  theory  of  the  Embassy, 
perhaps  the  discovery  of  America  itself,  was  involved 
in  that  very  poem.  Lord  Bacon's  honesty  may,  I  am 
sure,  be  found  there.  Alfred,  whatever  he  may  think, 
can  not  trifle — many  are  the  disputes  we  have  had 
about  his  powers  of  badinage,  compliment,  waltzing, 
&c.  His  smile  is  rather  a  grim  one.  I  am  glad  the 
book  is  come  out,  though  I  grieve  for  the  insertion  of 
these  little  things,  on  which  reviewers  and  dull  readers 
will  fix ;  so  that  the  right  appreciation  of  the  book  will 
be  retarded  a  dozen  years.'" 

FitzGerald 's  criticism  was  just,  but  his  forebodings 
were  far  from  being  realized.  It  is  significant  of  the 
hold  which  Tennyson  had  gained  almost  at  a  stroke 
over  his  generation  that  none  of  these  few  objection- 

1 '  Letters  and  Literary  Eemains  of  Edward  FitzGerald, '  Vol.  I,  p.  95. 


RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS  OF  1842  439 

able  pieces  were  seized  upon  in  any  quarter  to  turn 
his  whole  work  into  ridicule.  They  w^ere  quietly 
ignored.  It  took  no  dozen  years,  as  FitzGerald  had 
feared  and  foretold,  for  the  educated  public  to  appre- 
ciate the  new  poems  brought  to  its  attention,  though 
the  attention  of  critics  had  been  largely  confined  to 
the  old  ones.  For  it  was  the  contents  of  the  second 
volume  which  raised  Tennyson  to  the  proud  position 
which  he  was  soon  to  hold.  This  second  volume  it  is 
which  comprises  a  large  share  of  his  poetry  which  has 
become  a  part  of  the  permanent  riches  of  our  litera- 
ture. It  contained  in  all  twenty-nine  titles.  It  opened 
with  the  'Morte  d 'Arthur. '  In  it  were  to  be  found 
pieces  so  diverse  in  character  as  the  idyllic  'Garden- 
er's Daughter'  and  'Dora'  on  the  one  side,  and  such 
metaphysical  questionings  as  'The  Two  Voices'  and 
'The  Vision  of  Sin'  on  the  other.  Scattered  through 
the  volume  were  'St.  Simeon  Stylites,'  'Sir  Galahad,' 
'Ulysses,'  'The  Talking  Oak,'  'Godiva,'  and  numerous 
other  poems,  diverse  in  character  but  differing  only 
in  the  degree  of  their  sustained  excellence.  In  truth, 
one  secret  of  the  success  of  the  work  was  that  it 
contained  so  many  pieces  suited  to  different  and 
differing  orders  of  mind.  We  who  have  become 
familiar  with  them,  as  with  a  tale  that  has  been  told 
scores  of  times,  are  little  able  to  realize  the  impression 
they  made  upon  that  generation  of  young  and  ardent 
spirits  to  whom  they  came  with  the  suddenness  of  an 
inspired  revelation. 

Individuals    naturally    had    their    preferences    for 
particular  pieces.     But  one  poem  there  was   which 


440  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

became  at  once  known  throughout  the  English-speaking 
world.  This  was  'Locksley  Hall.'  The  popularity  it 
achieved  was  instantaneous.  It  was  reprinted  and 
circulated  everywhere.  Nor  has  the  favor  of  it  gained 
at  the  very  outset  ever  suffered  serious  diminution. 
This  is  not  to  maintain  that  the  piece  in  question  is 
Tennyson's  greatest  work  any  more  than  it  is  his 
longest.  There  are  others  of  his  productions  which 
display  characteristics  of  a  higher  grade  of  achieve- 
ment. Still  this  is  the  one  poem  which  has  appealed  to 
the  widest  circle  of  sympathies  and  tastes ;  and  so  long 
as  youth  continues  a  portion  of  life,  so  long  is  likely 
to  last  the  popularity  of  a  production  which  embodies 
the  hopes  and  dreams,  the  experiences  and  the  aspira- 
tions of  youth.  For  this  one  reason  alone  'Locksley 
Hall'  will  never  lack  readers  and  admirers  in  any 
and  every  age.  Forster  in  his  early  review  in  'The 
Examiner'  anticipated  the  general  contemporary 
verdict  in  asserting  that  this  "grand  poem,"  as  he 
called  it,  was  likely  to  become  the  favorite  piece  of 
the  whole  collection.  Such  it  became  at  once ;  such  it 
remained.  As  late  as  1850  Charles  Kingsley  spoke  of 
it  as  the  one  production  which  had  had  the  ''most 
influence  on  the  minds  of  the  young  men  of  our  day. '  '^ 
Forster 's  prediction  accordingly  turned  out  to  be 
true.  But  at  the  time  it  appeared  there  were  special 
reasons  which  contributed  to  the  unbounded  popu- 
larity of  'Locksley  Hall.'  No  other  poem  interpreted 
so  fully  the  spirit  of  the  age,  its  unrest,  its  hopes,  and 
aspirations,  its  boundless  belief  in  what  the  future 

1' Eraser's  Magazine,'  Vol.  XLII,  p.  249,  September,  1850. 


RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS  OF  1842  441 

had  in  store,  and  its  equally  boundless  belief  in  its 
ability  to  accomplish  all  that  it  dreamed.  The  period 
was  one  of  exultant  anticipation.  This  feeling,  it  was 
believed,  was  not  the  vague  mental  intoxication  which 
heralded  the  approach  of  the  French  Revolution,  but 
a  just  expectation  of  the  future  based  upon  a  calm 
and  clear-sighted  survey  of  the  forces  that  were  then 
in  operation  for  the  improvement  of  mankind.  Modern 
science  had  begun  to  enter  upon  its  career  of  immeas- 
urable conquest.  It  had  already  accomplished  much 
and  was  fairly  reckless  in  its  promises  of  what  further 
it  was  to  accomplish.  Distance  of  space  seemed 
already  on  the  road  to  annihilation  through  the  further 
application  of  steam  to  motive  power.  Electricity  was 
already  bringing  the  most  distant  regions  of  the  earth 
into  the  closest  proximity  of  intercourse.  The  barriers 
that  parted  man  from  man  and  nation  from  nation 
were  in  consequence  speedily  to  be  burst  asunder. 
These  wonder-working  achievements  of  science  it  was 
that  held  out  the  hope  of  a  happy  solution  of  the 
numerous  vexing  problems  which  had  long  been  lying 
hea\^  on  the  hearts  of  all  who  thought  and  felt. 

Accordingly  as  a  result  of  these  transforming 
processes,  when  at  last  they  had  been  brought  into 
full  and  active  operation,  little  limit  was  placed  on 
the  moral  and  political  progress  of  humanity.  Under 
the  influence  of  these  agencies,  life  would  be  made 
purer  and  loftier.  A  better  race  than  ours  would  come 
to  inherit  the  earth,  men  would  be  braver  and  nobler 
than  now  and  women  fairer  and  purer.  That  younger 
day  w^as  about  to  dawn  w^hen  the  conventions  that 


442  LIFE  AND  TIIVIES  OF  TENNYSON 

made  man  the  sport  of  the  accidents  of  birth  and 
fortune  were  destined  to  disappear ;  that  younger  day 
which,  in  the  fulness  of  time,  when  war  had  ceased, 
was  to  witness  the  federation  of  man,  the  parliament 
of  the  world.  It  was  a  fascinating  picture  which  the 
youthful  poet  held  before  the  minds  of  men  ready  to 
sympathize  with  its  most  glowing  promises.  It  was 
and  perhaps  will  always  remain  a  gorgeous  \dsion 
to  uplift  the  hearts  of  enthusiasts  and  to  inspire  the 
efforts  of  reformers.  But  when  it  appeared  it  was  in 
strictest  accord  with  the  dominant  feeling  of  the 
younger  generation  of  the  time.  In  its  glowing  lines 
were  recorded  the  optimistic  views  which  prevailed 
about  the  future  of  the  race.  It  is  little  wonder 
accordingly  that  an  age  which  found  its  most  cherished 
ideals  expressed  in  loftiest  language  should  have 
welcomed  Tvdth  enthusiasm  the  poem  and  placed  the 
poet  in  the  highest  rank  of  li\dng  authors. 

The  truth  is  that  the  success  which  came  to  Tenny- 
son in  the  first  instance  and  remained  the  secret  of  his 
continuous  popularity  at  times  in  face  of  frequent 
depreciation  or  intermittent  attack,  was  largely  due 
to  the  fact  that  he  mirrored,  as  did  no  other  poet  of 
his  period,  the  changing  feelings  and  the  varying 
moods  of  the  generations  to  which  he  successively 
appealed.  As  in  the  'Locksley  Hall'  of  1842  he 
reflected  the  hopes  and  aspirations  of  the  era  of  his 
youth,  so  in  the  'Locksley  Hall'  of  1886  he  reflected 
the  fears  and  disappointment  of  the  generation  which 
had  succeeded.  The  optimism  of  the  earlier  time  had 
given  place  to  the  despondency,  almost  partaking  of 


RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS  OF  1842         443 

the  nature  of  pessimism,  which  had  come  largely  to 
characterize  the  later.  Tliis  second  poem  has  often 
been  termed  a  palinode.  It  is  a  palinode  in  so  far  as 
it  gives  a  vivid  picture  of  the  change  which  had  come 
over  the  minds  of  men,  as  they  contrasted  the  realities 
which  confronted  them  mth  the  high-wrought  expec- 
tation which  had  once  been  cherished  of  the  brilliant 
results  that  were  to  follow  man's  increasing  conquests 
over  the  forces  of  nature.  Reflected  accordingly  in 
the  later  poem  was  the  reaction  of  the  closing  years 
of  the  century  against  the  hope  and  confidence  of  its 
prime.  The  gods  in  whom  men  had  been  taught  to 
trust  had  turned  out  to  be  vain  gods.  Distance  of 
space  and  length  of  time  were,  it  is  true,  on  the  road 
to  annihilation.  Luxuries  once  deemed  possible  only 
for  the  few  had  become  the  indispensable  necessities 
of  the  many.  Marvels,  once  even  undreamed  of  as 
belonging  to  the  realm  of  reality,  had  shrunk  by  usage 
into  the  most  matter-of-fact  commonplace.  Much  had 
been  added  in  many  ways  to  man's  material  comfort. 
But  how  about  man  himself!  Was  he  who  was 
whirled  fifty  miles  an  hour  along  the  Thames  any 
Aviser  or  better  than  he  who  more  than  a  score  of 
centuries  ago  sauntered  slowly  by  the  banks  of  the 
Ilissus?  It  was  inevitable  that  the  conviction  should 
come  that  the  material  agencies  from  which  so  much 
had  been  expected,  while  they  might  increase  man's 
resources  and  capabilities,  could  not  of  themselves 
add  either  to  his  real  happiness  or  to  his  moral  eleva- 
tion ;  that  the  progress  of  humanity  would  be  no  result 
of  external  forces  triumphing  over  the  inert  resistance 


444  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

of  matter,  but  of  the  slow  processes  of  those  internal 
changes  which  purify  and  elevate  the  soul;  that  the 
uplifting  of  the  indi\T.dual  must  invariably  precede  the 
uplifting  of  the  race;  and  that  he  accomplishes  most 
for  the  regeneration  of  the  world  who  in  his  sphere, 
whether  high  or  humble,  according  to  his  means, 
whether  vast  or  limited,  gives  up  his  life  to  the  service 
of  his  fellow  men. 

But  no  disturbing  feelings  of  this  nature  were 
prevalent  in  the  earlier  time.  So  great  indeed  was 
the  interest  inspired  by  this  poem  that  it  became  a 
favorite  belief  of  some  that  Tennyson  was  recording 
in  it  his  own  personal  experience.  In  a  review  of  his 
poems  several  years  after  the  publication  of  the 
volumes  of  1842,  Gilfillan  with  that  fine  critical  per- 
spicacity of  the  sort  he  w^as  wont  to  display  spoke  of 
this  particular  piece  as  telling  "a  tale  of  unfortunate 
passion  with  a  gusto  and  depth  of  feeling,  which 
(unless  we  misconstrue  the  mark  of  the  branding  iron) 
betray  more  than  a  fictitious  interest  in  the  theme.  "^ 
Still  later  Taine  made  a  suggestion  to  the  same  effect 
in  his  'History  of  English  Literature' — a  book  which 
would  be  as  valuable  as  it  is  delightful,  had  it  more 
frequently  occurred  to  the  author  that  it  was  desirable 
to  read  the  works  on  which  he  set  out  to  pass  judg- 
ment. ''Personal  memories,  they  said,  had  furnished 
the  matter  of  Maud  and  Lochsley  Hall,'^  are  his  words. 
But  this  attribution  was  not  limited  to  the  author 
himself.  On  account  of  the  Avide  popularity  of  the 
poem,  several  persons  were  induced  to  pose  as  its  hero 

1  'Tait's  Edinburgh  Magazine,'  Vol.  XIV,  p.  230,  April,  1847. 


RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS  OF  1842  445 

or  heroine.  There  was  manifestly  no  lack  of  candi- 
dates for  this  honor.  Tennyson's  son  represents  his 
father  as  saying  that  some  time  after  he  had  left 
Cambridge,  two  undergraduates  were  walking  together 
when  one  of  them  chanced  to  mention  the  poet's  name. 
The  other  replied  that  he  hated  the  man ;  for  he  himself 
was  the  unhappy  hero  of  Locksley  Hall.  *'It  is,"  he 
said,  ''the  story  of  my  cousin's  love  and  mine,  known 
to  all  Cambridge  when  Mr.  Tennyson  was  there,  and 
he  put  it  into  verse."  Dates  contribute  a  good  deal 
of  perplexity  to  this  particular  tale  of  woe.  As 
'Locksley  Hall'  did  not  appear  until  ten  years  after 
Tennyson  left  Cambridge,  it  is  hard  to  see  how  his 
student  contemporary  could  have  been  much  afflicted 
by  the  report  of  his  unfortunate  experience  unless  he 
had  achieved  a  noteworthy  place  in  the  history  of  the 
university  for  the  length  of  time  he  remained  an 
undergraduate.  But  this  was  merely  one  of  several 
instances.  Mary  Russell  Mitford,  for  example,  tells 
us  in  a  letter  of  August  7, 1847,  that  "William  Harness 
had  been  dining  with  the  heroine  of  'Locksley  Hall' 
and  her  husband."^  Doubtless  there  were  many 
similar  heroes  and  heroines  of  small  circles  whose 
names  have  never  reached  the  ears  of  the  public. 

1 '  Letters    of    Mary   Eussell    Mitford, '    2d    series,    edited    by    Henry 
Chorley,  1872,  Vol.  I,  p.  235. 


CHAPTER  XVII 
AMERICAN  RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS  OF  1842 

The  American  edition  of  Tennyson's  poems  followed 
a  few  weeks  after  the  appearance  of  the  English.  It 
came  from  the  Boston  house  of  Ticknor  &  Company. 
Doubtless  by  an  arrangement  with  the  poet  or  his 
London  publisher,  the  edition  was  almost  an  exact 
reproduction  of  the  one  brought  out  on  the  other  side 
of  the  Atlantic.  It  was  hardly  to  be  expected  that 
the  work  would  meet  with  the  success  in  America 
which  had  greeted  it  in  England,  in  spite  of  the  fact 
that  it  was  from  this  country  that  the  heaviest  pressure 
to  publish  had  come.  For  a  rapid  and  extensive 
circulation  of  the  volumes  in  the  United  States  the 
ground  had  hardly  been  prepared.  Here  the  previous 
productions  of  the  poet  had  been  practically  inacces- 
sible. There  is  still  in  existence  a  manuscript  volume 
in  the  handwriting  of  James  Russell  Lowell  which 
contains  a  number  of  Tennyson's  early  poems.  These 
had  been  copied  by  him  at  the  time  and  were  circulated 
among  a  group  of  private  friends.^  To  such  shifts 
were  the  American  admirers  of  the  poet  forced  to 
resort.  In  consequence,  there  had  been  little  oppor- 
tunity for  men  to  become  acquainted  with  his  writings ; 
by  vast  numbers  of  the  educated  even  his  very  name 

1  F.  Greenslet  's  '  James  Eussell  Lowell, '  p.  42. 


AIVIERICAN  RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS      447 

had  hardly  been  heard.  Furthermore,  the  piratical 
reprinting  of  British  periodicals,  brought  about  by 
the  absence  of  international  copyright,  had  noticeably 
destroyed  here  the  spirit  of  independent  criticism. 
Men  were  largely  in  a  state  of  intellectual  servitude. 
Accepting  views  at  second  hand  which  had  not  been 
worthy  of  being  heeded  at  first  hand,  and  retaining 
them  after  the  originators  had  outgrown  them,  or  had 
become  ashamed  of  them,  will  account  for  most  of  the 
hostile  criticism  to  which  Tennyson  was  here  subjected 
at  the  outset. 

A  somewhat  hesitating  attitude,  to  be  sure,  was 
occasionally  taken  which  was  not  at  all  due  to  that 
cause.  To  a  certain  extent,  both  in  England  and 
America,  the  perfect  finish  of  Tennyson's  poetry  has 
constantly  militated  against  the  loftiness  of  the  esti- 
mate placed  upon  it.  Men  have  always  shown  a 
disposition  to  become  tired  and  at  times  resentful  of 
anything  approaching  flawless  achievement.  It  is  a 
feeling  which  is  never  entirely  absent  from  human 
nature,  and  has  undoubtedly  often  expressed  itself  in 
action  long  before  Aristides  was  ostracized  by  his 
irritated  fellow  citizen  for  being  everywhere  termed 
the  Just.  Something  of  a  sentiment  of  the  same  general 
character  has  been,  even  from  the  beginning,  more  or 
less  prevalent  about  Tennyson.  With  a  particular 
class  of  readers  there  is  a  disposition  to  believe  that 
poetry  which  possesses  smootlmess  must  on  that  very 
account  be  deficient  in  strength.  It  lacks  strength 
because  it  lacks  roughness.  This  is  very  much  as  if 
a  great  piece  of  architecture  should  be  deemed  wanting 


448  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

in  solidity  and  stability  because  it  possesses  through- 
out the  beauty  of  grace  and  exquisite  proportion. 

Echoes  of  this  sort  of  feeling  were  heard  then  and 
long  afterward  even  from  those  honestly  disposed  to 
admire.  Early  in  August,  1842,  Charles  Sumner  wrote 
to  Milnes  of  the  appearance  of  the  American  edition. 
''Tennyson's  poems,"  he  said,  ''have  been  reprinted 
in  Boston,  and  the  reprint  is  a  precise  copy  of  the 
English  edition  in  size,  type,  and  paper,  so  that  it  is 
difficult  to  distinguish  the  two  editions.  It  is  reprinted 
for  the  benefit  of  the  author,  to  whom  the  publisher 
hopes  to  remit  some  honorarium.  Emerson  and  his 
followers  are  ardent  admirers  of  Tennyson,  and  it  is 
their  enthusiastic,  unhesitating  praise  that  induced  a 
bookseller  to  undertake  the  reprint.  There  are  some 
things  in  the  second  volume  which  I  admire  very  much. 
'  LocksleyHall '  has  some  magnificent  verses,  and  others 
hardly  intelligible.  'Godiva'  is  unequalled  as  a  narra- 
tive in  verse,  and  the  little  stories  of  Lady  Clare  and 
the  Lord  of  Burleigh  are  told  in  beautiful  measure. 
I  am  struck  with  the  melody  of  his  verse,  its  silver 
ring,  and  its  high  poetic  fancy;  but  does  it  not  want 
elevated  thought  and  manliness?  And  yet,  in  its  way, 
what  can  be  more  exquisite  than  (Enone  making 
Mount  Ida  echo  with  her  complaints'?  Was  her  story 
ever  told  in  a  sweeter  strain  in  any  language  ? '  '^ 

It  is  pretty  hard  for  us  at  this  late  day  to  discover 
what  any  one  could  then  have  found  unintelligible  in 
'  Locksley  Hall. '    But  the  sentiments  just  quoted,  little 

1  '  Life,  Letters  and  Friendships  of  Richard  Monckton  Milnes, '  Vol. 
I,  p.  279. 


AMERICAN  RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS      449 

as  they  would  have  satisfied  Tennyson's  ardent  admir- 
ers in  this  country,  doubtless  represent  fairly  the  view 
taken  then  by  many  cultivated  men  who  came  for  the 
first  time  to  the  perusal  of  these  poems.  But  here,  in 
truth,  possibly  more  than  in  England,  did  the  dispo- 
sition to  underrate  prevail  in  certain  quarters.  At 
all  events,  it  had  here  the  courage,  which  it  lacked 
there,  of  expressing  to  the  full  its  hostility.  Conse- 
quently the  old  depreciatory  remarks,  forgotten  or 
suppressed  in  England,  continued  to  be  repeated  in 
America  in  certain  quarters.  Tennyson's  career  was 
strewn  throughout  with  the  absurdities  of  English 
criticism;  and  it  is  not  fitting  that  those  exhibited  on 
this  side  of  the  Atlantic  should  escape  commemoration. 
They  lacked  here  even  the  slight  merit  of  originality. 
Two  utterances  in  particular,  which  then  appeared,  are 
worth  citing  because  they  show  conclusively  that  the 
impression  created  by  Lockhart's  article  was  even  at 
that  late  day  still  exerting  its  influence  in  this  country. 
A  peculiarly  choice  specimen  of  this  sort  of  pilfered 
severity  can  be  found  in  'The  Southern  Literary 
Messenger,'  published  at  Richmond,  Virginia.  For  the 
view  expressed  in  it,  its  author  cannot  plead  that 
hastiness  of  impression  which  results  from  the  limita- 
tion of  time  which  is  afforded  for  forming  an  opinion. 
The  criticism  did  not  appear  until  April,  1844. 
Accordingly  the  writer  had  had  the  benefit  of  two 
years  to  make  up  his  mind.  He  gained  nothing  by 
the  delay.  He  did  little  more  than  repeat  in  an 
intensified  form  the  opinions  expressed  in  the  'Quar- 
terly' of  1833,  though  at  this  date  their  very  author 


450  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

had  been  forced  to  repent  of  tlieir  publication  if  lie 
had  not  gained  the  grace  to  feel  ashamed  of  their 
character.  The  American  reviewer  rehashed  all  the 
old  criticisms  apparently  under  the  belief  that  they 
were  his  own.  He  actually  went  back  to  Lockhart's 
article  and  quoted  from  it  the  lines  to  Christopher 
North;  for  the  volume  in  which  these  had  appeared 
he  had  manifestly  never  seen.  *'Mr.  Tennyson,"  was 
his  conclusion,  ' '  appears  to  be  a  man  of  slender  intel- 
lect, who  has  inflamed  his  imagination  by  believing 
himself  a  poet,  and  has  supplied  its  numerous  vacuities 
by  studying  the  works  of  others. ' ' 

Fortunately  for  his  repute  the  name  of  this  gifted 
southern  critic  has  either  been  forgotten  or  more 
probably  has  been  studiously  withheld  from  the  knowl- 
edge of  the  public.^  Unfortunately  such  good  luck  has 
not  fallen  to  the  lot  of  his  northern  rival.  In  the  same 
quarterly,  in  which  six  years  before  a  cordial  welcome 
had  been  extended  to  Tennyson's  early  verse,  appeared 
a  review  of  the  poems  of  1842  altogether  different  in 
character.^  It  came  too  from  an  honored  name.  It 
was  the  work  of  Felton,  professor  of  Greek  at  Harvard 
College.  Felton  was  a  scholar  and  a  man  of  culture ; 
but  he  was  as  little  alive  to  the  new  influences  that 
were  beginning  to  dominate  literature  as  was  Croker 
on  the  other  side  of  the  Atlantic.    He  belonged  to  the 

1 ' '  An  anonymous  reviewer  of  Tennyson 's  poems  is  not  at  all  com- 
plimentary."— 'The  Southern  Literary  Messenger,  1834-1864,'  by  Benja- 
min Blake  Minor,  Editor  and  Proprietor  from  1843  to  1847,  1905,  p.  123. 
One  gets  the  impression  that  the  anonymous  reviewer  was  the  editor 
himself. 

2 'Christian  Examiner,'  Vol.  XXXIII,  pp.  237-244,  November,  1842. 


AMERICAN  RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS      451 

old  school  of  critics  who  accepted  fully  the  belief  that 
the  poetry  at  this  time  coming  into  vogue — that  of 
Keats  and  Tennyson — lacked  the  severe  simplicity  and 
classic  spirit  of  the  former  age.  Such  persons  had 
been  somewhat  discouraged  by  the  defection  of  the 
'Quarterly'  in  allomng  a  so-called  favorable  notice 
of  Tennyson  to  appear  in  its  columns.  Its  authority, 
however,  was  not  sufficient  to  dispose  them  to  bow 
do"v\Ti  and  worship  at  the  shrine  of  the  new  deity  which 
the  men  of  the  younger  generation  had  set  up. 

Of  these  recalcitrants  on  this  side  of  the  Atlantic, 
Felton  w^as  one  of  the  most  conspicuous.  His  article 
indeed  is  of  particular  interest  because  it  reveals  how 
wide-reaching  had  been  the  influence  of  Lockhart's 
criticism,  and  how  intense  was  still  the  prejudice 
against  Tennyson  which  had  been  set  in  motion  by  the 
hostile  treatment  which  had  been  accorded  him  in  his 
own  land.  Here  we  find  it  manifesting  its  old  char- 
acter and  vigor  in  what  must  be  called  not  the  most 
abusive  but  distinctly  the  silliest  criticism  which  the 
poet's  new  venture  received  anywhere.  'The  Quar- 
terly Review'  might  yield  to  the  change  which  had 
been  going  on  in  public  sentiment  and  retract  its 
pre^dous  censures.  Not  so  its  faithful  followers  in 
this  country.  Fate  has  been  kind  to  many  critics 
during  their  lives  in  hiding  behind  a  bulwark  of  tj'pe 
all  public  knowledge  of  the  authorship  of  their  pro- 
ductions. It  has  been  even  kinder  in  death,  when  not 
merely  is  their  memory  forgotten  but  the  memory  of 
what  they  wrote.  Hard,  therefore,  has  been  the  fortune 
of  this  particular  reviewer,  who  could  so  little  forecast 


452  LIFE  AND  TBIES  OF  TENNYSON 

the  future  that,  disdaining  the  shelter  of  anonymous- 
ness,  he  signed  his  initials  to  his  article.  Few  are  the 
men  who  would  like  to  go  down  to  posterity  mth  their 
names  attached  to  the  criticism  now  to  be  considered. 
A  curiosity  it  assuredly  is  both  for  the  ridiculousness 
of  the  opinions  which  it  expressed  and  for  the  ridicu- 
lousness of  the  facts  which  it  stated.  It  is  in  the 
following  way  that  Felton  paid  his  respects  to  the 
new  poet. 

''Mr.  Tennyson's  poetical  fortunes,"  began  the 
review,  "have  been  singularly  various.  Some  six  or 
seven  years  ago  he  first  became  known,  partly  by  his 
own  extraordinary  demerits,  and  chiefly  by  a  stringent 
review  in  the  London  Quarterly.  It  was  supposed 
that  he  was,  poetically  speaking,  dead;  he  certainly 
was,  theatrically  speaking,  though  not  theologically, 
damned.  Strange  to  say,  his  poems  found  their  way 
across  the  Atlantic,  and  gained  favor  in  the  eyes  of 
a  peculiar  class  of  sentimentalists.  Young  ladies  were 
known  to  copy  them  entire,  and  learn  them  by  heart. 
Stanzas  of  most  melodious  unmeaningness  passed 
from  mouth  to  mouth,  and  were  praised  to  the  very 
echo.  The  man  who  possessed  a  copy  was  the  envy 
of  more  than  twenty  persons,  counting  women  and 
children;  until  at  length  Mr.  Tennyson  came  into 
possession  of  a  very  considerable  amount  of  reputa- 
tion. His  ardent  admirers  sent  to  England  for  copies ; 
but  singularly  enough,  not  one  was  to  be  had.  The 
poet  had  bought  them  all  up  and  committed  them  to 
the  flames ;  but  moved  by  the  transatlantic  resurrection 
of  his   poetical   character,   he   set   about   convincing 


AMEEICAN  RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS      453 

people  that  he  was  alive  too  at  home.  He  broke  upon 
the  world  in  the  twofold  splendor  of  a  pair  of  volumes, 
published  in  Mr.  Moxon's  finest  style.  His  former 
writings  were  clipped  of  many  puerilities,  and  brought 
nearer  the  confines  of  common  sense;  to  them  were 
added  many  poems  never  before  printed,  some  of 
which  are  marked  by  a  delicate  frost-work  kind  of 
beauty.  The  London  Quarterly  Journalists  came  out 
immediately  mth  a  long  and  highly  laudatory  critique, 
and  ranked  Mr.  Tennyson  among  the  foremost  poets 
of  the  age,  ^\'ithout  an  allusion  to  the  homicidal  attack 
they  had  made  on  him  only  a  few  short  years  before; 
and  without  the  least  apology  for  surrendering  the 
infallibility  of  re\dewers." 

Whether  it  was  owing  to  inaccuracy  of  information 
or  to  sportiveness  of  spirit  manifesting  itself  in  a 
somewhat  elephantine  way,  it  is  clear  that  several  of 
the  statements  made  in  the  foregoing  paragraph  are 
not  to  be  recommended  for  their  rigid  conformity  to 
fact.  But  these  were  left  far  behind  by  the  critical 
estimate  and  imaginary  personal  portrayal,  honestly 
intended  to  be  facetious,  which  followed.  Along  with 
his  severity  ran  Felton's  stern  determination  to  be 
jocose  at  all  hazards.  He  did  not  deny  the  poet  the 
possession  of  some  genius.  There  was  even  an 
affectation  of  candor  in  his  remark  that  Tennyson 
looked  ^ '  on  things  with  a  poetical  eye ' ' — which  is  some- 
thing more  than  could  be  said  for  his  critic.  But  he 
modified  even  this  praise  by  adding  that  the  things  he 
looks  on  are  "small  things,  and  his  eye  is  none  of  the 
largest.  .  .  .  He  has  a  remarkable  alacrity  at  sinking. " 


454  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

Further  we  were  told  that  while  he  was  ''a  dainty 
poet,"  he  was  deficient  in  manly  thought  and  strong 
expression.  "He  is,"  said  the  critic,  "a  curious 
compound  of  the  poet,  the  dandy,  and  the  Delia  Crus- 
can. ' '  As  was  to  be  expected,  affectation  was  declared 
to  be  his  prevailing  intellectual  vice.  The  critic  added 
a  playful  mental  picture  of  the  bodily  presence  of  the 
man,  the  verisimilitude  of  which  must  have  much 
impressed  those  who  were  aware  of  the  poet's  care- 
lessness in  dress.  "We  cannot  help  fancying  him," 
said  Felton,  "to  be  altogether  finical  in  his  personal 
habits.  He  is  a  sweet  gentleman  and  delights  to  gaze 
upon  his  image  in  a  glass ;  his  hair  is  probably  long, 
and  carefully  curled;  he  writes  in  white  kid  gloves, 
on  scented  paper;  perhaps  he  sleeps  in  yellow  curl- 
papers. We  are  certain  he  lisps."  But  with  all  this 
distressing  facetiousness,  the  critic  was  not  altogether 
unfair.  It  may  be  maintained  indeed  that  he  unde- 
signedly made  much  more  than  amends  for  what  he 
said  by  what  he  did.  As  a  sort  of  offset  to  a  review 
intended  to  be  mildly  satirical  and  wholly  humorous, 
he  printed  the  whole  of  '  Locksley  Hall. '  It  is  not  often 
that  a  critic  of  poetry  is  willing  to  disclose  to  the 
intelligent  reader  so  manifest  an  exhibition  of  his  own 
critical  incapacity. 

There  were  other  unfavorable  notices  in  American 
periodicals,  but  none  quite  so  hopelessly  inane  as  the 
two  which  have  just  been  cited.  It  must  not  be  fancied, 
however,  that  these  reflected  the  prevailing  tone  of 
criticism.  Even  hostile  as  these  were,  they  admitted 
the  fact  that  the  poems  had  met  with  success.     The 


\ 


AMERICAN  RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS      455 

writer  in  the  northern  periodical  bore  reluctant 
witness  to  their  popularity,  especially  to  their  popu- 
larity with  those  who  lacked  the  austere  taste  and 
intellectual  virility  of  the  critic,  and  his  disdain  for 
the  meretricious  charms  with  which  the  poet  had 
bedecked  his  muse.  The  re\'iewer  in  'The  Southern 
Literary  Messenger'  felt  obliged  to  concede  the  fact 
that  they  had  been  received  favorably.  ''They  have 
been  republished  here, ' '  he  said, ' '  and  we  are  informed 
that  they  have  met  with  a  ready  and  extensive  sale." 
For  in  America  as  in  England,  the  poems  found  read- 
ers who  had  been  brought  up  on  more  nourishing 
intellectual  diet  than  old  'Quarterly  Reviews.'  As 
time  went  on,  even  Felton,  while  retaining  his  hostility, 
felt  that  he  must  concede  to  the  poet  genius  of  a  certain 
sort  as  well  as  the  popularity  which  he  deplored.  In 
'The  North  American  Review'  for  April,  1844,  there 
was  a  criticism  by  him  of  the  poems  of  Lowell.^  In 
the  course  of  it  he  spoke  of  the  feeble  and  flat  imita- 
tions of  Mrs.  Hemans  which  had  appeared.  "And 
now,"  he  continued,  "feebler  and  flatter  imitations  of 
Alfred  Tennyson  wear  out  the  forbearance  of  a  long- 
suffering  public."  He  found  the  same  fault  with  the 
American  poet  that  'The  Quarterly  Review'  had 
previously  found  with  Milnes.  He  warned  him  against 
the  tendency  to  imitate  Tennyson.  He  discovered  in 
him  "a  disposition  to  mimic  the  jingle  of  a  man  who, 
with  much  genius,  and  an  exquisite  ear  for  musical 
rhythm,  has  also  a  Titanian  fondness  for  quaint  and 

1  Vol.  LVIII,  p.  286. 


456  LIFE  AND  TIIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

dainty    expressions,    affected    turns,    and    mawkishly 
effeminate  sentiment." 

To  Felton  indeed  and  to  men  like  him  in  control  of 
'The  North  American  Eeview,'  there  continued  to  be 
a  persistent  ignoring  of  the  work  of  Tennyson  which 
was  not  in  the  least  due  to  ignorance.  For  a  long 
series  of  years,  he  was  the  one  English  poet  whom 
that  periodical  sedulously  refrained  from  noticing. 
Though  time  and  space  were  given  up  to  elaborate 
criticisms  of  English  writers  of  far  inferior  grade,  no 
review  of  Tennyson  appeared  for  many  years  in  its 
columns.  Incidental  references  only  are  to  be  found. 
Naturally  there  was  nothing  said  about  the  volumes 
of  1842.  But  likewise  there  was  nothing  said  of  'The 
Princess,'  of  'In  Memoriam,'  of  the  'Ode  on  the  Death 
of  the  Duke  of  Wellington.'  It  was  not  until  1855 
when  his  reputation  had  swept  aw^ay  all  unfavorable 
criticism  of  the  slightest  significance,  that  a  single 
article  on  his  works  was  allowed  to  appear.  It  was 
a  review  of  'Maud.'  It  was  not  very  long,  nor  as  a 
piece  of  criticism  was  it  broad.  Still,  feeble  as  it  was, 
it  was  intended  to  be  complimentary.  But  by  that 
time  it  had  become  a  matter  of  indifference  to  readers 
whether  any  notice  of  his  poetry  appeared  in  'The 
North  American  Re^dew'  or  not.  Every  one  had  then 
made  up  his  mind — that  is,  every  one  who  had  a  mind 
to  make  up — and  cared  little  what  any  critic  said  either 
for  or  against  the  poet.  It  is,  however,  justice  to  add 
that  in  the  periodical  in  question  various  incidental 
references  to  Tennyson  appeared  during  the  interval. 
Some  of  them  too  were  highly  laudatory ;  for  contribu- 


AMERICAN  RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS      457 

tors  to  the  review  had  sense,  even  if  its  conductors 
did  not. 

There  Avas  doubtless  a  certain  amount  of  truth  in 
the  satirical  references  made  by  Felton  to  the  class 
of  persons  who  had  welcomed  with  special  enthusiasm 
Tennyson's  earlier  volumes.  The  pressure  from 
America  to  publish  had  come  to  no  small  extent  from 
the  group  of  disciples  who  had  gathered  about  Emer- 
son. It  was  far  from  being  confined  to  them,  but  in 
them  it  found  its  noisiest  manifestation.  They 
belonged  to  the  so-called  Transcendental  School  which 
in  1841  had  established  as  a  sort  of  oflQcial  organ  the 
quarterly  periodical  called  'The  Dial.'  Of  this  pub- 
lication Margaret  Fuller  was  the  original  editor. 
Testimony  to  the  admiration  felt  for  Tennyson  by 
the  members  of  this  band  is  met  with  frequently.  A 
belated  notice  of  his  two  early  volumes  appeared  in 
'The  Dial'  for  July,  1841.^  It  pretty  certainly  came 
from  the  pen  of  its  editor.  "Tennyson  is  known  by 
heart,"  said  the  writer,  "is  copied  as  Greek  works 
were  at  the  revival  of  literature;  nothing  has  been 
known  for  ten  years  back  more  the  darling  of  the 
young  than  these  two  little  volumes. ' ' 

Accordingly  it  was  inevitable  that  the  members  of 
the  circle  which  surrounded  Emerson — who,  though 
an  admirer  of  the  poet,  was  far  from  being  as  enthu- 
siastic a  one  as  his  followers — it  was  inevitable  that 
they  should  hail  A\ath  intense  gratification  the  prospect 
of  the  publication  of  additional  poems  by  their  favorite. 
The  forthcoming  work  was  duly  announced  in  'The 

1  Vol.  II,  p.  135. 


458  LIFE  AND  TIIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

Dial'  for  July,  1842.^  '' Alfred  Tennyson,"  it  said, 
''moved  by  being  informed  of  his  American  popularity, 
has  given  himself  to  the  labor  of  revising  and  reprint- 
ing a  selection  of  his  old  poems,  and  adding  as  many 
new  ones,  which  he  has  sent  to  Mr.  Wheeler  of  Harvard 
University,  who  is  republishing  them  here."  It  is 
evidence  of  the  distance  of  time  as  well  as  of  space 
which  then  separated  the  two  continents  that  the  work, 
which  Tennyson  is  here  described  as  preparing  for 
the  press,  had  already  been  before  the  English  people 
for  several  weeks.  By  the  group  of  persons  already 
indicated,  the  volumes  when  they  came  out  in  this 
country  were  received  with  intense  enthusiasm.  A 
most  cordial  review  of  them  appeared  in  'The  Dial' 
for  October  of  the  same  year,  which  by  its  fervor 
contrasts  sharply  with  the  staid  tone  of  the  English 
quarterlies.  This  again  was  probably  the  work  of 
Margaret  Fuller.  It  certainly  corresponds  in  spirit 
to  the  words  in  her  journal  of  August,  1842,  in  which 
she  records  her  impression  of  the  work  which  had  just 
appeared  in  America.  "I  have  just  been  reading," 
it  said,  "the  new  poems  of  Tennyson.  Much  has  he 
thought,  much  suffered,  since  the  first  ecstasy  of  so 
fine  an  organization  clothed  all  the  world  w^ith  rosy 
light.  He  has  not  suffered  himself  to  become  a  mere 
intellectual  voluptuary,  nor  the  songster  of  fancy  and 
passion,  but  has  earnestly  revolved  the  problems  of 
life,  and  his  conclusions  are  calmly  noble.  In  these 
later  verses  is  a  still,  deep  sweetness;  how  different 
from  the  intoxicating  sensuous  melody  of  his  earlier 

1  Vol.  Ill,  p.  135. 


AJMERICAN  RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS      459 

cadence."  In  the  article  itself  there  was  little  limit 
to  the  praise  bestowed.  Approbation  indeed  was  given 
to  poems  for  which  few  have  been  found  to  say  a  good 
word.  ''Nothing  is  more  uncommon,"  said,  for 
instance,  the  writer,  "than  the  lightness  of  touch, 
which  gives  a  charm  to  such  little  pieces  as  the  'Skip- 
ping Rope.'  "  It  ought  to  be  more  than  uncommon; 
it  should  be  impossible. 

But  the  article  represented  fairly,  in  general,  the 
attitude  of  the  early  American  admirers  of  the  poet 
who  had  been  instrumental  in  urging  upon  him  the 
necessity  of  appearing  once  more  in  print.  It  was  of 
course  far  from  being  universal.  In  the  various  criti- 
cal utterances  in  this  country,  as  well  as  in  England, 
there  was  at  times  displayed  ignorance;  there  was 
indifference ;  there  was  to  a  certain  extent  hostility. 
Depreciatory  opinions  came  occasionally  from  quar- 
ters where  we  should  least  have  expected  it.  Even  in 
'The  Dial'^  itself,  as  at  about  the  same  time  in  'The 
Cambridge  University  Magazine,'  appeared  re^dews 
of  Tennyson's  poems  which  did  not  err  on  the  side  of 
undue  praise.  The  writer  in  the  former  periodical 
objected  to  him  as  being  too  superfine,  as  lacking  what 
he  called  rude  truth — whatever  he  meant  by  the  phrase. 
"We  must  not  make  our  bread  of  pure  sugar,"  he 
remarked.    "The  poem,"  he  added,  "of  all  the  poetry 

1  It  has  been  a  very  common  statement  that  it  was  Emerson's  admira- 
tion of  the  poems  that  caused  their  publication  in  America.  But  it  was 
not  so  much  the  admiration  of  Emerson  as  that  of  his  followers.  When 
Margaret  Fuller  ceased  to  edit  'The  Dial,'  its  tone  immediately  changed. 
Under  Emerson 's  editorship  no  one  could  accuse  it  of  extravagant 
praise  of  Tennyson.  In  it  appeared  some  of  those  extraordinary  literary 
judgments  which  eminence  indulges  in  for  the  comfort  of  its  inferiors. 


460  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

of  the  present  age,  for  which  we  predict  the  longest 
term,  is  'Abou  ben  Adhem'  of  Leigh  Hunt."^  In  the 
English  periodical  the  writer  repeated  the  old  formu- 
las, criticised  the  poet  for  his  quaintnesses  of  spelling 
and  expression,  and  in  particular  for  his  doggerel. 
Of  this  last  'Will  Waterproof's  Lyrical  Monologue' 
was  cited  as  a  peculiarly  objectionable  specimen. 
These  expressions  of  opinion  need  no  comment ;  for  of 
themselves  they  indicate  unmistakably  the  literary 
status  of  the  critics.  It  will  probably  occasion  no 
surprise  to  learn  that  both  the  periodicals  in  which 
they  appeared  speedily  died. 

But  articles  like  these  were  after  all  mere  eddies  in 
the  general  stream  of  approbation.  There  was  a  great 
deal  of  genuine  appreciation  early  manifested  in  this 
country  which  had  not  been  fed  on  previous  knowledge, 
although  it  was  not  till  the  following  decade  that  it  had 
had  time  to  become  practically  universal.  Not  to  speak 
of  various  anonymous  printed  utterances,  a  cordial 
tribute  was  paid  the  poet  in  1845  by  Edwin  Percy 
Whipple,  w^ho  at  that  period  held,  especially  in  New 
England,  high  repute  as  one  of  the  country's  most 
eminent  critics.  This  is  a  sort  of  reputation,  which, 
whether  deserved  or  undeserved,  is  of  the  most  tran- 
sitory nature.  Eufus  Wilmot  Griswold,  an  industrious 
but  not  illuminating  compiler,  had  brought  out  a 
volume  entitled  'The  Poets  and  Poetry  of  England 
in  the  Nineteenth  Century.'  In  it  he  assured  us  with 
delightful  gravity  that  the  writings  of  Alfred  Tenny- 
son have  sufficient  merit  to  place  him  '4n  the  third 

1  April,  1843,  Vol.  Ill,  pp.  517-518. 


AMERICAN  RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS      461 

or  fourth  rank  of  contemporary  English  poets. "  With 
this  solemn  pronouncement  Whipple  naturally  made 
himself  merry  in  his  review  of  the  second  edition  of 
the  work  which  appeared  in  1844.  To  outspoken  praise 
of  the  poet  he  devoted  several  pages. ^ 

But  no  published  criticism  at  this  early  date,  either 
in  America  or  any  other  country,  rivalled  that  of  Foe 
in  the  estimate  placed  upon  Tennyson's  achievement. 
It  found  expression  again  and  again.  It  must  be  borne 
in  mind  that  Poe  died  in  1849.  This  was  before  a 
great  deal  of  the  work  by  which  Tennyson  is  now 
largely  known  was  in  existence,  or  at  least  had  come 
to  the  knowledge  of  men.  Accordingly,  he  was  familiar 
only  with  his  comparatively  early  verse,  which  still 
continued  to  be  disparaged  by  many.  But  Poe,  who 
never  lacked  the  courage  of  his  convictions,  had  no 
hesitation  in  proclaiming  the  superiority  of  Tennyson 
to  all  the  poets  of  his  generation.  His  criticism  of 
other  authors  varied  widely  at  times — at  least  it 
seemed  to  vary — as  to  the  nature  and  extent  of  their 
merits  or  demerits.  But  in  regard  to  Tennyson  he 
never  wavered;  though  he  would  persist — or  at  least 
his  publishers  did — in  printing  'CEnone'  as  *^none.' 
His  conclusions  were  based  largely  upon  the  poems 
found  in  the  edition  of  1842.  As  early  as  August,  1843, 
he  had  expressed  his  admiration.  It  went  far  beyond 
what  most  admirers  were  then  willing  to  go,  or  at  least 
were  permitted  to  go  in  their  published  utterance. 
''For  Tennyson,"  he  wrote,  '*as  for  a  man  imbued 
with  the  richest  and  rarest  poetic  impulses,  we  have  an 

I'The  American  Eeview,  A  WTiig  Journal,'  Vol.  II,  p.  45. 


462  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

admiration — a  reverence  unbounded.  His  'Morte 
d 'Arthur,'  his  'Locksley  Hall,'  his  'Sleeping  Beauty,' 
his  'Lady  of  Shalott,'  his  'Lotos-Eaters,'  his  '^none,' 
and  many  other  poems,  are  not  surpassed  in  all  that 
gives  to  Poetry  its  distinctive  value,  by  the  composi- 
tions of  any  one  living  or  dead."^  A  little  more  than 
a  year  after,  he  went  much  farther  than  any  one  else 
had  ever  gone,  at  least  in  print.  He  was  not  content 
with  merely  putting  him  at  the  head  of  contemporary 
writers.  "I  am  not  sure,"  he  wrote,  "that  Tennyson 
is  not  the  greatest  of  poets.  The  uncertainty  attending 
the  public  conception  of  the  term  'poet'  alone  pre- 
vents me  from  demonstrating  that  he  is.  Other  bards 
produce  effects  which  are,  now  and  then,  otherwise 
produced  than  by  what  we  call  poems;  but  Tennyson 
an  effect  which  only  a  poem  does.  His  alone  are 
idiosyncratic  poems.  By  the  enjoyment  or  non-enjoy- 
ment of  the  'Morte  d 'Arthur,'  or  of  '^none,'  I  would 
test  any  one's  ideal  sense. "^  Nor  did  the  attitude  here 
indicated  ever  change.  His  last  recorded  utterance 
about  Tennyson  was  not  printed  till  after  his  own 
death.  In  the  essay  entitled  'The  Poetic  Principle,' 
in  citing  from  'The  Princess'  the  four  stanzas  begin- 
ning "Tears,  idle  tears,"  he  asserted  of  their  author 
that  "in  perfect  sincerity  I  regard  him  as  the  noblest 
poet  that  ever  lived.  "^ 

Still  it  is  manifest  from  the  evidence  that  has  been 
presented  that  the  appreciation,  great  as  it  was,  which 

I'Our  Amateur  Poets,'  No.  3,  'Graham's  Magazine,'  August,  1843. 
2 'Democratic  Eeview,'  December,  1844,  Vol.  XV,  p.  580. 
3'Sartain's  Union  Magazine,'  October,  1850,  Vol.  VI,  p.  238. 


AI^IERICAN  RECEPTION  OF  THE  POEMS      463 

at  that  early  time  waited  upon  Tennyson,  had  as  yet 
neither  in  England  nor  America  become  universal. 
Little  of  the  enthusiasm  which  prevailed  among  the 
most  cultivated  class  of  readers,  especially  among  the 
younger  members  of  that  body,  found  expressions  in 
the  organs  which  professed  to  represent  and  guide 
public  opinion.  The  only  review  of  that  period  which 
gave  full  and  unreserved  utterance  to  the  sentiment 
which  was  ultimately  to  prevail  can  be  found  in  'Tait's 
Edinburgh  Magazine'  of  August,  1842.  But  another 
voice  from  that  same  region  was  silent.  It  was  a  voice, 
too,  which  under  ordinary  conditions  might  well  have 
been  expected  to  be  the  very  first  to  greet  the  man 
who  had  so  unexpectedly  to  most  exhibited  his  poetical 
supremacy.  Yet  from  it  no  welcome  was  heard.  Of 
the  new  work  which  cultivated  readers  all  over  the 
land  were  talking  about,  no  notice  was  taken  by  the 
then  renowned  critic  of  ^Blackwood's  Magazine.'  In 
its  conduct  his  influence  still  remained  predominant. 
Not  for  some  years  after  the  publication  of  the  volumes 
of  1842  was  the  name  of  Tennyson  so  much  as  men- 
tioned in  the  columns  of  that  periodical.  But  more 
than  simple  omission  had  characterized  the  critic's 
course ;  there  had  been  aggressive  action.  At  the  time 
itself  the  poet  indeed  was  not  assailed  by  name ;  but  he 
was  so  by  implication.  The  appearance  of  another 
work  was  seized  upon  as  the  occasion  to  minimize 
or  rather  to  depreciate  his  achievement.  No  notice 
has  ever  been  taken  of  these  attacks  upon  Tennyson 
either  by  his  biographers  or  by  students  of  the  literary 
history  of  the  times.    But  the  attitude  assumed  towards 


464  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TEN^^YSON 

the  first  poet  of  the  age  in  the  early  years  of  his  career 
by  him  who  was  generally  rated  as  the  first  critic  of 
the  age  is  a  matter  of  sufficient  importance  to  demand 
full  recital.  It  assuredly  forms  a  distinctly  curious 
story  in  the  history  of  criticism;  and  as  it  has  never 
been  told,  to  its  narration  the  following  chapter  shall 
be  devoted. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 

CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  LATER  ATTACKS  ON 
TENNYSON 

In  spite  of  its  bluster  and  rowdyism  and  occasional 
mad  antics  of  all  sorts,  'Blackwood's  Magazine'  for 
the  quarter  of  a  century  following  its  foundation  in 
1817  was  one  of  the  best-conducted  of  British  literary 
periodicals.  Furthermore  it  was  on  the  whole  one 
of  the  fairest.  That,  too,  it  was  in  spite  of  its  virulent 
Toryism  and  frequent  lapses  into  the  most  reprehen- 
sible outbursts  of  abuse.  Its  editor  is  now  known  to 
have  been  its  publisher.  By  the  great  body  of  its 
readers,  however,  John  Wilson — better  known  by  his- 
pseudonym  of  Christopher  North — was  credited  with 
holding  that  place.  He  was  so  called  indeed  by  Lock- 
hart.  The  belief  was  to  this  extent  true  in  that  he 
was  the  great  mainstay  of  the  magazine.  Without 
his  help  it  certainly  could  never  have  kept  the  position 
it  speedily  secured,  even  if  it  could  have  reached  it 
at  all. 

Wilson's  criticism  of  the  Tennyson  volume  of  1830 
was,  as  we  have  seen,  followed  by  the  petulant  and 
foolish  lines  addressed  to  Christopher  North  in  the 
volume  of  1832.  These  were  unworthy  both  in  their 
matter  and  in  their  spirit.  In  spite  of  the  swaggering 
tone  of  the  article,  its  patronizing  airs,  its  denunciation 


466  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

of  particular  pieces,  and  that  general  assumption  of 
superiority  which  is  part  of  the  stock  in  trade  of  the 
reviewer,  the  impression  given  by  it  as  a  whole  was 
distinctly  favorable.  Wilson  indeed  had  a  right  to  feel 
indignant  at  the  way,  both  petty  and  pettish,  in  which 
his  criticism  had  been  taken  by  its  subject.  He  how- 
ever took  no  notice — at  least  no  public  notice — at  the 
time  of  the  attack  upon  himself.  What  he  might  have 
said  was  said  vicariously  through  Lockhart's  article 
in  the  '  Quarterly. '  He  kept  silence  indeed  for  several 
years,  so  far  certainly  as  any  published  utterances  in 
his  own  magazine  were  concerned.  Nor  was  there  in 
that  periodical  any  exhibition  of  hostility  to  Tennyson. 
On  the  contrary,  it  contained  a  few  of  what  might  have 
been  deemed  then  fairly  flattering  references  to  his 
work,  however  inadequate  they  may  seem  now.  In  a 
highly  laudatory  review  of  Trench's  'Story  of  Justin 
Martyr'  praise  was  given  to  the  sonnets  of  Tennyson.^ 
These,  to  be  sure,  were  the  poems  of  his  least  deserv- 
ing of  commendation.  Nor  would  the  junction  of  his 
name  with  the  other  writers  mentioned — Leigh  Hunt, 
David  Moir,  Barry  Cornwall,  and  John  Clare — ^impress 
men  of  the  present  day  as  conveying  much  of  a  compli- 
ment. Still,  it  is  always  unfair  to  judge  of  the 
criticism  of  the  past  by  the  estimation  of  the  present. 
Every  great  writer  attains  in  time  to  a  certain  wealth 
of  reputation,  not  indeed  an  unearned  increment,  but 
an  amount  of  compound  interest  which  has  been 
accruing  since  the  investment  was  first  made. 

But  though  he  said  nothing  for  a  time,  Wilson's 

1' Blackwood's  Magazine,'  September,  1835,  Vol.  XXXVIII,  p.  425. 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  LATER  ATTACKS  467 

resentment  for  the  attack  made  upon  him  never 
slumbered.  We  hear  often  of  the  irritability  and 
sensitiveness  of  authors.  There  are  assuredly  among 
them  individuals  easily  affected  by  hostile  criticism; 
but  as  a  body  they  are  no  more  sensitive  than  any 
other  class  of  men.  Similar  displays  of  feeling  occur 
on  every  side  and  by  the  members  of  every  profession ; 
but  the  knowledge  of  these  never  reaches  the  ears  of 
any  beyond  the  circle  of  their  immediate  personal 
acquaintance.  But  the  resentment  of  authors  is  not 
merely  vocal;  it  is  also  permanent.  It  is  fairly  sure 
to  be  printed  and  widely  circulated.  If  they  have 
achieved  popularity,  it  is  talked  about  everywhere. 
So  long  as  their  works  continue  to  be  read,  it  is  never 
forgotten,  while  the  resentment  of  the  critic,  no  matter 
how  eminent  in  his  day,  is  little  likely  to  be  known 
to  posterity,  for  the  knowledge  of  it  never  reaches 
posterity.  The  cases  are  very  exceptional  when  criti- 
cal literature  interests  and  influences  any  one  but 
contemporaries.  Rarely  indeed  is  it  even  heard  of 
save  by  contemporaries.  Consequently,  as  in  the  case 
of  other  men,  with  the  passing  away  of  the  life  of  the 
reviewer  passes  away  all  memory  of  the  resentment 
he  may  have  displayed. 

If,  however,  sensitiveness  to  disparagement  of  their 
work  can  be  predicated  of  authors  as  a  body,  it  is  the 
most  marked  in  the  case  of  those  of  them  who  are 
specially  critics  by  profession.  Accustomed  to  attack 
others  with  little  restraint,  they  become  furious  at  any 
attack  upon  themselves.  There  has  already  been 
occasion  to  record  the  excitement  and  wrath  displayed 


468  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

in  this  particular  on  one  occasion  by  both  Lockhart 
and  Wilson.  It  is  with  the  latter  only  that  we  have 
to  deal  here.  Never  was  susceptibility  to  a  petty 
personal  quip  more  signally  exhibited  than  it  was  by 
him  in  his  later  attitude  towards  the  poet.  Great  as 
had  been  the  sensitiveness  shown  by  Tennyson  to 
Wilson's  review,  it  was  more  than  equalled,  it  was  far 
surpassed  by  the  sensitiveness  of  Wilson  to  Tenny- 
son's retort.  The  latter  had  had  the  grace  to  become 
ashamed  of  his  outburst  almost  as  soon  as  he  found 
it  too  late  to  have  it  recalled.  But  his  apologetic 
letter  did  not  placate  the  critic.  Wilson  brooded  over 
it.  As  time  went  on,  it  loomed  up  more  and  more 
distinctly  in  his  thoughts.  Some  years  indeed  passed 
before  he  gave  expression  to  his  resentment,  at  least 
public  expression.  It  seems  likely  that  at  first  he 
fancied  Tennyson's  career  would  be  too  inconspicuous 
for  him  to  add  anything  to  the  assumed  crushing 
attack  which  had  come  from  the  'Quarterly.'  But  as 
years  went  by,  the  poet's  reputation,  though  increasing 
slowly,  was  still  increasing.  The  faith  in  him  of  his 
original  friends  and  admirers,  so  far  from  wavering, 
was  steadily  becoming  more  intensified.  But,  further- 
more, it  was  beginning  to  be  shared  by  those  who  had 
with  Tennyson  no  ties  of  personal  acquaintance.  This 
slow  but  steady  advance  in  the  estimation  of  the  public 
began  at  last  to  attract  the  attention  of  Wilson.  More 
and  more  he  noted  it,  more  and  more  he  took  it  amiss. 
He  became  embittered  enough  at  last  to  assume  the 
offensive. 

Foolish  as  had  been  Tennyson's  manifestation  of 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  LATER  ATTACKS  469 

resentment  at  Wilson's  article,  the  critic  was  now  to 
show  himself  far  more  censurable  in  the  matter  of 
what  he  said,  in  the  spirit  with  which  he  said  it,  and 
in  the  addition  of  reprehensible  conduct  for  w^hat  he 
pretended  he  had  said  but  what  he  had  failed  to  say. 
Nor  did  the  attacks  he  soon  came  to  make  have  the 
excuse  of  momentary  irritation.  On  the  contrary,  they 
followed  years  after  the  offence  had  been  originally 
committed;  they  were  continued  as  long  as  he  dared 
to  oppose  his  own  view  of  the  poet  to  that  of  the  public. 
Though  no  notice  has  ever  been  taken  of  these  utter- 
ances, though  all  knowledge  of  them  seems  to  have 
died  from  the  memory  of  men,  they  present  a  curious 
picture  of  the  importance  which  the  editors  of  the 
leading  critical  periodicals  then  attributed  to  their 
own  opinions,  and  the  sanctity  they  assumed  for 
themselves. 

In  this  matter  one  sees  the  reason  why  Jeffrey 
gained  the  hold  he  did  upon  his  generation.  Whatever 
were  his  other  critical  shortcomings,  he  cherished  no 
resentment  for  attacks  upon  himself,  when  he  came  to 
express  a  literary  judgment.  Take  his  attitude  upon 
the  publication  of  the  first  two  cantos  of  'Childe 
Harold.'  This  came  out  at  a  time  when  a  verdict  of 
'The  Edinburgh  Re\^ew'  usually  carried  life  or  death 
for  the  time  being  to  the  work  it  criticised.  Jeffrey 
had  been  fiercely  attacked  by  Byron  in  his  'English 
Bards  and  Scotch  Reviewers.'  In  a  note  to  his  new 
venture  the  poet  gave  further  expression  to  the  feel- 
ings of  enmity  which  he  still  cherished  against  the 
periodical  and  its  editor.     But  none  of  these  things 


470  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

affected  in  the  slightest  the  estimate  which  Jeffrey- 
gave  of  the  new  work.  At  the  close  of  his  article  he 
made  merely  the  slightest  of  references  to  the  hostility 
of  Byron  towards  himself  personally.  ''For  our  own 
parts, ' '  he  concluded, ' '  when  we  speak  in  our  collective 
and  public  capacity,  we  have  neither  resentments  nor 
predilections;  and  take  no  merit  to  ourselves  for 
having  spoken  of  Lord  Byron's  present  publication 
exactly  as  we  should  have  done,  had  we  never  heard 
of  him  before  as  an  author. ' '  Men  may  take  exception 
to  Jeffrey's  critical  views;  but  fault  can  rarely  be 
found  with  his  critical  attitude.  In  that  it  is  easy  to 
see  one  great  reason  why  he  so  powerfully  impressed  i 
his  contemporaries  as  a  literary  judge. 

Not  so  with  Wilson.    He  never  forgot  or  forgave. 
The   resentment   he   cherished   for    Tennyson's    con- 
temptuous  refusal   of   any  praise   he   had  bestowed 
continued  to  rankle  in  his  bosom,  though  it  was  not 
until  nearly  four  years  after  the  publication  of  the  ; 
volume  of  1832  that  it  made  first  public  manifestation  ,; 
of  itself.    This  occurred  in  a  review  of  the  'Miscella-  - 
neous  Plays'  of  Joanna  Baillie.     That  authoress  had  ': 
in  1836  broken  the  silence  of  several  years  by  bringing  j 
out  three  volumes  of  dramatic  pieces.     They  received  \ 
the  usual  laudatory  notice  from  the  regular  critics  and  j 
were  received  with  the  usual  indifference  by  the  public.  : 
The  fortunes  of  that  play^vright,  it  may  be  said  here,  i 
were  peculiar.    Rarely  has  any  one  been  more  praised  j 
by  those  whose  praise  was  worth  having.     From  the  ] 
time  of  her  first  appearance  as  a  dramatic  writer  in  I 
1798  until  the  publication  just  mentioned,  the  most  | 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  LATER  ATTACKS  471 

authoritative  reviewers  expressed  unqualified  com- 
mendation of  her  work.  By  minor  critics  she  had  been 
attacked ;  but  of  the  great  ones  Jeffrey  seems  to  have 
been  the  only  one  who  managed  to  retain  his  judgment 
along  ^ith  his  admiration.  By  Scott  she  was  called 
the  bold  enchantress  who  had  awakened  the  inspired 
strain  of  Shakespeare. 

The  practice  of  so  celebrating  her  began  early  and 
continued  late.  Her  plays  were  extolled  as  exhibiting 
the  development  of  the  pure  dramatic  faculty  with  the 
least  possible  aid  from  external  influences.  Her  lyrics, 
which  were  but  ordinary  productions,  were  spoken  of 
in  terms  of  extravagant  eulogy.  But  while  her  plays 
were  warmly  praised  by  critics,  they  met  with  com- 
paratively little  success  upon  the  stage.  Yet  powerful 
influences  were  several  times  at  work  to  make  them 
succeed.  In  1800  the  Kembles  brought  out  'De  Mont- 
fort'  at  Drury  Lane.  The  aristocracy  lent  the  produc- 
tion its  fullest  support.  Members  of  it  wrote  prologue 
and  epilogue.  More  than  anything  else,  the  principal 
female  part  was  taken  by  Mrs.  Siddons.  Yet  with  all 
these  aids,  direct  and  adventitious,  it  was  with  difficulty 
the  play  was  made  to  run  eleven  nights.  In  spite  of 
occasional  successes,  this  experience  represents  in 
general  the  fortune  which  befell  the  representation 
of  her  pieces.  They  were  unfitted  for  the  stage,  it 
was  said,  in  consequence  of  the  theory  of  composition 
she  had  adopted.  Her  whole  object  in  each  one  was 
to  represent  the  development  of  a  single  passion. 
While  this  method  might  be  good  for  the  closet,  it 
practically  debarred  the  use  of  stage  effect.     Unfor- 


472  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

tiinately  for  tliis  explanation,  these  plays  succeeded 
no  better  with  the  reading  public  than  they  did  with 
the  frequenters  of  the  theater.  Her  works  had  a 
respectable  sale;  but  they  were  never  popular  then 
and  certainly  have  had  time  since  to  be  largely 
forgotten. 

Wilson's  review  of  these  volumes  appeared  in  1836 
in  the  January  and  February  numbers  of  '  Blackwood. ' 
It  repeated  the  same  eulogies  of  the  excellence  of  these 
dramas   which  had  been   current   among  the   critics 
of  Joanna  Baillie  from  the  beginning  of  the  century. 
He  felt  that  Scott  had  been  justified  in  linking  her 
name  with  that  of  Shakespeare.     He  contrasted  the 
superiority  of  her  work  with  the  inferiority  of  what 
was  then  being  produced.    He  gave  vent  to  his  usual 
lamentation   about   the   decay   of   poetry  which   had 
followed  the  passing  away  of  the  great  authors  of  the 
Georgian  era.    *' Where  are  the  young  poets'?"  he  said 
with  a  sigh — at  least  he  said  he  sighed.     Dim  in  his 
eyes  and  somewhat  small  were  the  few  luminaries  that 
were  then  in  ascension.    Poetical  ability,  it  was  true, 
was  not  then  entirely  lacking ;  but  it  was  not  poetical  | 
ability  of  a  high  grade.     On  the  strength  of  these  | 
introductory  remarks,  he  went  out  of  his  way  in  his 
second  article  to  rebuke  the  folly  of  the  little  band  of  ■ 
admirers  whose  belief  in  the  greatness  of  Tennyson  ^ 
was  at  last  beginning  to  make  itself  distinctly  felt.  ■• 
Though  it  could  in  no  sense  be  said  to  extend  andii 
increase   perceptibly  the   sale   of  his   works,   it   waSi 
sufficient  to  arouse  the  hostility  of  those  who  denied 
his   claims.     It   affected  Wilson  notably.     It  might, 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  LATER  ATTACKS  473 

almost  be  said  indeed  that  the  second  of  these  articles 
appears  to  have  been  written  about  as  much  for  the 
disparagement  of  Tennyson  as  it  was  for  the  glorifi- 
cation of  Joanna  Baillie  and  incidentally  of  himself. 
''Not  but  that  there  is  poetical  genius,"  wrote 
Wilson, ' '  among  our  young  aspirants — the  Tennysons, 
the  Trenches,  the  Alfords,  and  others,  whom  we  have 
delighted  to  praise ;  and  whom  we  should  rejoice  to  see 
shining  as  fixed  stars  of  the  first  magnitude  in  the 
poetical  firmament.  Fixed  stars  of  the  first  magnitude  I 
Why,  it  was  debated  in  a  spouting  society  at  Cam- 
bridge—'Is  Alfred  Tennyson  a  GREAT  POET'! 
Shakespeare,  Homer,  Milton,  and  Wordsworth  are 
Great  Poets ;  and  it  might  have  been  thought  that  the 
mere  mention  of  such  names  would  have  silenced  the 
most  flatulent  of  all  the  praters.  The  'bare  imagi- 
nation' of  such  a  debate  must  bring  the  blush  of 
shame  on  the  face  of  every  man  of  common  sense; 
and  Mr.  Tennyson  himself  must  have  wept  with 
vexation  at  the  ineffable  folly  of  his  friends  who 
maintained  the  affirmative.  Let  him  lay  to  heart  the 
kind  counsels  of  Christopher  North,  who  alone  has 
done  justice  to  his  fine  faculties,  and  the  laurel  crown 
^^ill  erelong  be  placed  on  his  head.  He  has  yet  written 
but  some  beautiful  verses — a  few  very  charming 
compositions,  that  are  in  truth  little  poems — not  great 
ones — his  feeling  is  exquisite,  and  so  is  his  fancy — 
but  oh!  how  feeble  too  often  his  Thought!  Feeble 
because  he  is  a  wilful  fribble — flattery  has  made  him 
so — but  would  he  but  scorn  his  sycophants,  his  strength 


474  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

would  be  restored,  and  nature  would  be  glad  to  see 
him,  what  she  designed  him  to  be,  a  true  poet." 

This  quotation  is  noteworthy  for  the  grudging 
recognition  it  gave  of  the  ability  of  the  man  it  per- 
functorily praised.  Wilson  could  not  deny  Tennyson 's 
genius  as  a  poet.  He  was  too  thoroughly  sensitive  to 
intellectual  beauty  to  commit  so  gross  an  absurdity 
as  that,  even  with  the  resentment  he  continued  to 
cherish  at  the  provocation  he  had  received.  Still  his 
words  plainly  imply  also  that  he  was  disposed  to 
regard  him  as  a  poet  of  inferior  rank,  and  that  such 
he  would  always  remain.  His  place  was  among  the 
''true"  poets,  not  among  the  great  ones.  Wilson 
honestly  believed  that  he  was  doing  Tennyson  sufficient 
honor  by  putting  him  in  the  same  class  mth  Alford, 
with  Trench,  and  several  others  whom  he  included 
under  the  general  name  of  the  Young  Poets.  In  a 
certain  way  and  to  a  certain  extent,  he  approved  of 
all  of  them;  but  that  any  one  of  their  number  had 
furnished  e\ddence  of  being  a  great  poet,  even  any 
greater  poet  than  himself  for  example,  had  probably 
never  occurred  to  him  as  conceivable.  He  has  left  us 
no  doubt  of  his  feelings  on  this  point;  a  little  later 
in  this  same  article  he  made  his  state  of  mind  e\ddent. 
' '  To  speak  the  plain  truth  at  once, ' '  he  went  on  to  say, 
**not  one  of  our  young  poets — and  some  of  them  are 
full  fledged — has  taken  a  single  sustained  flight  higher 
than  the  cock  on  the  spire  of  a  village  church.  Not 
one  of  them  has  written  a  poem  that  has  taken  posses- 
sion of  the  nation's  heart.  Each  bardling  has  his 
admirers,  who  commit  bits  of  him  to  a  treacherous 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  LATER  ATTACKS  475 

or  tenacious  memory — but  when  they  quote  a  response 
of  their  oracle,  it  falls  dead  on  the  ears  of  the  ground- 
lings— and  all  are  groundlings,  in  their  estimation, 
who  will  not  fall  down  and  worship  such  'despicable 
gods.'  " 

Though  this  language  was  general,  there  was  but 
one  specific  application  of  it  possible.  There  was  no 
person  whom  the  critic  could  have  had  in  mind  but 
Tennyson.  No  one  but  he  of  these  younger  poets  could 
boast  of  a  body  of  professed  admirers.  In  censuring 
them  for  the  zeal  they  displayed,  Wilson  might  well 
have  remembered  his  o^\ti  position  a  quarter  of  a 
century  before.  At  that  time  he  was  himself  one  of 
a  very  small  band  who  celebrated  to  an  indifferent 
or  contemptuous  world  the  greatness  of  Wordsworth. 
What  he  now  said  of  Tennyson  would  have  been  then 
true  of  the  writer  who  had  aroused  his  own  early 
enthusiasm.  No  poem  of  Wordsworth  at  the  period 
Wilson  began  to  chant  his  praises  had  taken  possession 
of  the  nation's  heart.  The  lines  which  that  poet's 
admirers  then  committed  to  memory  fell  dead  upon 
the  ears  of  the  groundlings,  or  were  more  frequently 
made  the  subject  of  derision.  He  had  lived  to  see  this 
all  changed.  He  had  lived  to  find  Wordsworth's  finest 
pieces  not  merely  cherished  by  multitudes  of  readers, 
but  unqualified  praise  bestowed  upon  his  prosiest 
performances. 

Still  later  in  this  same  article  Wilson  unconsciously 
revealed  how  heavily  Tennyson  lay  on  his  mind  and 
how  much  he  continued  to  be  irritated  by  the  admira- 
tion entertained  and  expressed  for  the  poet  by  the 


476  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

men  of  Cambridge.  It  occurs  in  the  midst  of  the 
laudations  with  which  the  writers  in  '  Blackwood '  were 
everlastingly  bedaubing  themselves  and  the  assump- 
tion they  persistently  maintained  that  the  reputation 
of  authors  was  not  so  much  the  result  of  their  own 
personal  achievement  as  of  the  way  in  which  they 
were  spoken  of  in  this  periodical.  Wilson  discoursed 
about  the  Young  Poets  and  what  he  individually  had 
done  for  them.  ''Were  it  not  for  Us,"  he  wrote, 
''where  would  they  be  I  Nowhere.  Out  of  Cambridge 
and  Cockneydom,  how  many  scores  of  Christian 
creatures  have  ever  seen  either  of  Alfred  Tennyson's 
Volumes?  Not  fourscore.  In  Maga  many  of  his  best 
compositions  have  been  perused  with  delight  by  tens 
of  thousands — and  as  sympathy  is  what  every  poet 
most  fervently  desires,  how  deep  ought  to  be — and 
how  deep  must  be — his  gratitude  to  Christopher 
North !  '  Fit  audience  find  though  few '  was  a  sentiment 
all  very  well  at  the  time — for  the  Poet  of  Paradise 
Lost.  But  a  young  lyrical  poet  of  the  present  day 
cannot,  do  what  he  will,  be  satisfied  with  the  applauses 
of  a  coterie  of  under-graduates,  though  graced  with 
the  countenance  of  the  Wooden  Spoon  of  the  year, 
shining  in  the  gloss  of  novelty  almost  like  a  horn. 
He  longs  for  a  'waking  empire  wide  as  dreams,'  and 
he  finds  it  in  the  most  beneficent  of  perennials  whose 
smile  is  fame,  and  whose  praise  is  immortality." 

For  the  sake  of  glorifying  himself  Wilson  in  these 
remarks  had  taken  the  pains  not  to  worry  about  exact- 
ness of  statement.  There  are  those  who  would  call 
it    deliberate    misrepresentation.      The    clientele    of 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  LATER  ATTACKS  477 

Tennyson  was  assuredly  at  that  time  small ;  but  it  was 
altogether  larger  and  wider  than  the  critic  gave  the 
impression  of  its  being.  It  was  made  up,  too,  of  men 
who  besides  being  of  superior  ability,  were  coming  to 
have  that  superiority  widely  recognized.  Such  persons 
were  not  in  the  habit  of  going  to  any  periodical  what- 
ever in  order  to  have  their  opinions  formed  or  formu- 
lated. Their  very  independence  contributed  to  the 
growth  of  their  influence.  A  much  more  reprehensible 
parsimony  in  the  use  of  truth  was  perceptible  in  the 
assertion  that  the  readers  of  'Blackwood's  Magazine' 
had  seen  the  poet's  best  compositions.  The  only 
criticism  found  in  it  had  been  of  the  volume  of  1830. 
Not  the  slightest  notice  had  been  taken  of  the  much 
superior  work  found  in  the  volume  of  1832.  So  far 
from  a  single  poem  it  contained  having  been  quoted 
there,  not  even  so  much  as  an  allusion  had  ever  been 
made  to  the  volume  at  all  or  to  anything  of  merit 
appearing  in  it.  But  the  passages  are  interesting  as 
showing  how  keenly  the  man  who  was  so  ready  to 
criticise  others  felt  any  blow  that  was  aimed  at  himself 
in  return.  It  is  evident  also  that  he  had  an  uneasy 
consciousness  that  Tennyson,  however  un"\villing  his 
critic  was  to  concede  him  greatness,  was  in  possession 
of  powers  outside  of  his  own  capacity  of  expression. 

This  latter  state  of  mind  was  more  than  indicated, 
it  was  openly  confessed  in  a  review  which  appeared 
a  few  months  later  of  a  work  of  Alford's,  entitled 
'The  School  of  the  Heart.'  It  is  noteworthy  that  in 
this  re\^ew,  while  Wilson  affected  to  rank  Tennyson 
among    the    other    Cambridge    poets    who    were    his 


478  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

contemporaries,  his  critical  sense  was  too  keen  to 
allow  him  to  perpetrate  a  blunder  of  that  kind  unquali- 
fiedly. He  recognized  and  admitted  that  the  work  of 
this  particular  author  was  essentially  different  from 
that  of  the  rest,  though  it  might  be  hard  to  tell  whether 
in  his  opinion  it  was  a  difference  for  the  better  or  the 
worse.  He  declared  that  in  reading  the  new  poems 
that  were  coming  out  he  felt  as  if  they  had  been  written 
by  himself.  They  reflected  dimly  or  clearly  his  own 
emotions.  '  ^  This  may  be  the  secret  cause, ' '  he  wrote, 
*'of  the  delight  which  we  derive  from  almost  every 
publication,  whether  in  prose  or  verse,  called  new  by 
the  public,  and  fondly  believed  to  be  so  by  the  nominal 
author.  It  is  a  mirror  dimly  or  clearly  reflecting  our- 
selves. There  have  been  some  exceptions — and  among 
them  perhaps  the  most  conspicuous  were  the  Poems, 
chiefly  Lyrical,  by  Alfred  Tennyson.  They  contained 
numerous  beauties  which  we  feel  to  be  original  and 
out  of  our  sphere ;  and  on  our  expressing  our  delighted 
admiration  of  them,  we  gave  vent  to  the  most  unselfish 
and  disinterested  feelings  that  could  expand  a  critic's 
breast.  Their  follies  were  so  peculiarly  his  own,  that 
in  printing  them,  almost  without  comment,  we  left 
them  to  speak  for  themselves,  and  they  did  so  to  the 
general  scorn.'" 

The  reader  may  well  hesitate  in  accepting  without 
qualification  the  assertion  that  a  criticism  of  particular 
pieces  which  designates  them  as  ''drivel,"  ''miserable 
drivel,"  "more  dismal  drivel,"  "distinguished  silli- 
ness," and  similar  summary  expressions  of  opinion 

1' Blackwood '8  Magazine,'  May,  1836,  Vol.  XXXIX,  p.  578. 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  LATER  ATTACKS  479 

can  have  a  just  title  to  be  regarded  as  printing  them 
almost  without  comment.  This  was  true  as  regards 
space,  but  can  hardly  plead  for  itself  ambiguity  of 
condemnation.  Wilson's  further  and  final  statement 
serves  as  an  introduction  to  the  unconscious  revelation 
which  he  was  now  to  make  of  how  much  he  had  been 
stung  b}^  the  lines  which  had  been  addressed  to 
Christopher  North  in  the  volume  of  1832.  Years  had 
gone  by  since  their  appearance.  Had  he  been  really 
indifferent  to  them,  they  would  have  been  forgotten. 
Had  he  received  the  poet's  apology  for  them  in  the 
spirit  in  which  it  was  sent,  they  would  have  been 
forgiven.  But  he  was  now  to  show  that  the  bite  of  the 
midget,  as  he  now  styled  it,  which  he  characterized 
as  impotent,  had  been  singularly  effective  and  painful. 
It  is  possible  indeed  that  his  feelings  may  have  been 
further  irritated  by  allusions  to  it  by  his  enemies; 
though,  so  far  as  I  am  aware,  no  evidence  exists  of 
any  such  fact. 

After  glorifying  as  we  have  seen,  the  nobility  and 
impartiality  of  the  course  he  had  followed  in  reference 
to  the  poet,  Wilson  entered  into  the  particulars  of  his 
own  grievance.  "For  conduct  so  judicious  and 
benign,"  he  wrote,  "Mr.  Tennyson  commissioned  a 
midge  to  madden  and  murder  us  with  its  fatal  sting. 
A  billion  midges  attacking  the  face  and  hands  of  one 
old  man  on  a  summer  tmlight  might  annoy  him 
sorely,  and  drive  him  from  his  avenue  into  his  house. 
But  one  midge,  the  first  and  last  of  his  race,  could 
not  rationally  expect  to  send  Christopher  North  to 
Hades.  .  .  .  We  survived  the  onslaught  of  the  unhappy 


480  LIFE  AND  TIIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

little  insect,  who  impotently  expired  '  even  in  the  sound 
himself  had  made,'  to  afflict,  on  the  earliest  oppor- 
tunity, the  ingenious  lyrist  with  our  intolerable  pane- 
gyrics. We  are  not  without  hopes  of  driving  him 
absolutely  mad ;  for  his  genius  is  unquestionable,  and 
no  comfort  he  may  derive  from  our  ridicule  will 
suffice  to  make  his  life  endurable  under  the  opprobrium 
of  our  praise.  True  that  Wordsworth,  Scott,  Cole- 
ridge, Southey,  Campbell,  Crabbe,  Byron,  Moore, 
Bowles,  Montgomery,  and  Elliott  have  received 
kindly  what  Alfred  Tennyson  'with  sputtering  noise 
rejected';  but  they  are  gluttons,  he  an  Epicure: 

He  on  honey  dew  hath  fed, 
And  breathed  the  air  of  Paradise," 

Never  under  an  affectation  of  jovial  indifference  did 
a  critic  betray  keener  sensitiveness.  The  wound 
inflicted  by  the  bite  of  the  midget  had  manifestly  begun 
to  fester.  After  years  had  passed,  Wilson  continued 
to  pay  an  attention  to  the  little  squib  directed  against 
himself  which  it  had  not  deserved  at  the  time  of  its 
appearance  when  it  was  fresh  in  memory.  Yet  his 
perspicacity  did  not  fail  him.  Inflamed  as  were  his 
feelings,  he  fully  recognized  that  Tennyson  was  a 
writer  of  a  new  school.  He  was,  as  he  admitted,  out 
of  his  own  sphere.  His  language  may  have  been 
ironical ;  but  whether  the  words  expressed  his  genuine 
sentiments  or  not — and  they  pretty  surely  did  express 
them — there  can  be  no  question  that  unwittingly  or 
wittingly  he  had  spoken  the  truth.  The  poetry  of 
Alford  or  of  Trench  which  he  had  reviewed  favorably 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  LATER  ATTACKS  481 

was  not  essentially  different  in  character  from  the 
elegant  but  somewhat  vapid  verse  which  he  himself 
had  written.  But  in  making  a  critical  estimate  of 
Tennyson  he  was  dealing  not  only  with  a  new  writer 
but  "\\ith  a  new  force.  Him  it  was  not  in  his  power 
to  appreciate  fully.  He  could  venture  to  assume  that 
he  himself  could  have  written  the  productions  of  the 
other  bards  whom  he  had  mentioned  with  praise;  but 
it  hardly  needed  his  own  disclaimer  that  he  never 
could  have  fancied  himself  the  author  of  'Poems, 
chiefly  Lyrical.'  The  real  difficulty  with  Tennyson  in 
Wilson's  eyes  was  that  he  not  only  had  more  genius 
than  it  was  quite  proper  to  possess,  but  it  was  genius 
of  a  different  kind  from  that  which  his  critic  was 
disposed  to  approve. 

Wilson  had  said  that  in  spite  of  the  lines  addressed 
to  Christopher  North  he  had  continued  to  afflict 
Tennyson  ^vith  his  panegyrics.  If  so,  he  must  have 
confined  them  to  his  conversation :  he  has  been  careful 
not  to  put  them  in  print.  Nor  furthermore  did  he 
content  himself  mth  casting  ridicule  upon  the  claims 
made  for  Tennyson  by  his  partisans.  He  proceeded 
to  set  up  a  rival  of  his  own.  There  is  something 
extraordinary  in  the  fatuousness  he  displayed,  when  we 
bear  in  mind  that,  when  he  was  acting  untrammelled 
and  unprejudiced,  his  literary  appreciation  was  keen 
and  his  literary  discernment  was  usually  trustworthy. 
About  this  time  he  fancied  that  he  had  discovered  a 
new  poet — a  poet  altogether  superior  to  any  of  those 
of  the  modern  generation,  whom  he  was  now  learning 


482  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

to  term  disdainfully  the  Young  Poets.  The  opinion 
of  his  merits  was  contained  in  the  leading  article  of 
'Blackwood's  Magazine'  for  November,  1837/  It  was 
entitled  'Poetry  by  Our  New  Contributor.'  Him  he 
lauded  in  the  highest  terms ;  from  him  he  quoted 
several  pieces.  According  to  the  critic,  one  of  them 
which  was  on  a  French  subject  surpassed  everything 
found  in  the  recently  published  'French  Revolution' 
of  Carlyle,  whose  name  somewhat  strangely  he  spelled 
Carlisle.  But  it  was  not  till  the  number  for  May  of 
the  following  year  that  he  pronounced  definitely  the 
superiority  of  this  new  contributor  to  all  his  contem- 
poraries. This  critical  estimate  was  given  in  an  article 
entitled  'Our  Two  Vases.' 

In  this  article  he  gathered  together  the  poetical 
pieces  sent  which  he  specially  approved.  With  them 
was  conjoined  a  running  comment  of  his  own.  "Who 
are  the  best,"  he  wrote,  "of  our  rising  or  risen  Poets, 
since  the  burst-out  of  Byron?  We  leave  the  older 
Heroes  by  themselves — living  or  dead — from  Words- 
worth to  Hunt.  Moir,  Motherwell,  Tennyson,  Alford, 
Trench — any  more?  Knowles,  Beddoes,  Taylor,  Tal- 
fourd,  Bulwer,  are  Dramatists — and  though  as  unlike 
to  one  another  as  may  well  be,  belong  to  another 
Class — and  must  be  treated  accordingly,  should  we 
ever  find  ourselves  in  a  promising  mood  for  such  a 
Series.  But  of  the  Poets  aforesaid,  think  ye  the  very 
best — whoever  he  may  be — could  have  written  the 
follo\ving  stanzas — by  ArchsBusI    Could  he — and  if  he 

1  Vol.  XLII,  pp.  573-598. 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  LATER  ATTACKS  483 

can — will  he  write  something  as  good?    We  opine  'tis 
a  solemn  strain  worthy  of  one  of  the  laurel-crowned 

Serene  Creators  of  immortal  things."^ 

After  this  glo^ving  introduction  followed  a  poem 
entitled  'Lady  Jane  Grey.'  It  was  a  very  good  piece 
of  work  of  the  highly  superior  prize-poem  order.  This 
was  the  production  of  the  much-vaunted  new  con- 
tributor who  wrote  under  the  signature  of  Archaeus. 
In  the  magazine  of  the  following  month  this  poem 
was  followed  by  another  from  the  same  author  called 
'Aphrodite. '  With  it  Wilson  was  more  than  delighted. 
He  placed  but  little  restraint  upon  the  expression  of 
his  praise.  This,  he  said,  * '  places  Archseus  among  the 
POETS  OF  ENGLAND. '  '^  The  clevatiou  to  which  the  critic 
had  raised  him  was  indicated  by  printing  the  last  three 
words  in  small  caps.  Who,  it  may  be  asked,  was  this 
new  contributor,  before  whom  Tennyson,  of  whom 
Wilson  knew  too  much,  and  Browning,  of  whom  he 
apparently  knew  nothing  at  all,  were  to  fade  into 
insignificance?  He  was  an  author  whose  memory  has 
been  mainly  preserved,  so  far  as  it  has  been  preserved, 
by  what  others  have  written  about  him,  not  by  any- 
thing he  wrote  himself.  It  was  John  Sterling.  The 
praise  of  Wilson  was  grateful  at  the  time  to  the  man 
whom  death  had  already  marked  for  his  own;  but  it 
never  lifted  him  into  any  public  recognition  even  then 
and  it  has  assuredly  not  done  so  since.    To  speak  of 


iVol.  XLIII,  p.  698. 

2  June,  1838,  Vol.  XLIII,  p.  735. 


484  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

him  as  a  poet  alongside  of  Tennyson  was  criticism  run 
mad. 

The  feeling  about  Tennyson  which  had  now  laid  hold 
of  Wilson  was  again  displayed  in  an  article  which 
appeared  in  April  of  the  following  year.^  It  was 
entitled  'Christopher  in  his  Alcove.'  In  this  he 
brought  together  a  number  of  poems  written  by  those 
he  called  Our  Young  Poets.  Special  emphasis  was 
laid  upon  the  our  in  contrast  to  those  whom  before 
and  afterwards  he  derisively  termed  the  Young  Poets, 
when  he  did  not  choose  to  call  them  '^sumphs."  His 
remarks  are  of  interest  and  value  for  another  reason. 
They  confirm  the  statement  previously  made  that  a 
school  of  writers  were  consciously  founding  themselves 
upon  Tennyson  even  at  that  early  date,  when  his 
reputation  could  scarcely  be  said  to  have  spread  out- 
side of  a  comparatively  limited  circle,  and  when  he 
was  slightingly  spoken  of  by  the  ordinary  professional 
critic.  "All  our  young  poets,"  wrote  Wilson,  **are 
fine,  unaffected  fellows,  full  of  force  and  fire ;  and  they 
would  all,  every  mother's  son  of  them,  disdain  them- 
selves, did  their  consciences  convict  them  of  the  sin 
of  a  single  stanza,  indited  purposely  to  mystify  some 
worthless  truism,  through  the  embroidered  veil  of  its 
envelopment  of  gorgeous  and  gaudy  words.  The 
SuMPHS  are  all  now  of  the  Shelley,  or  of  the  Tennyson 
school — and,  hear,  0  heavens!  and  give  ear,  0  earth! 
disciples  of  Wordsworth  !  Surely  the  soles  of  the  feet 
of  at  least  half  a  score  of  them  must  now  be  tingling, 
prescient   of  the   bastinado."     Wilson   had   not  yet 

1  Vol.  XLV,  p.  546. 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  LATER  ATTACKS  485 

become  conscious  of  the  fact — he  was  at  a  later  period 
to  learn  it — that  a  generation  was  coming  on  which 
was  to  pay  little  heed  to  the  blows  inflicted  by  the 
bastinade  or  the  crutch  he  wielded. 

This  w^as  the  state  of  mind  in  regard  to  Tennyson 
of  the  most  influential  critic  of  the  fourth  decade  of 
the  nineteenth  century.  In  the  review  of  Joanna 
Baillie  in  which  began  this  series  of  attacks  upon  the 
poet,  occurred  the  following  passage-  in  the  general 
bespattering  of  praise  which  Wilson  was  wont  to  give 
to  his  own  influence.  There  was  indeed — at  least  there 
had  been — a  certain  justification  for  what  he  said 
about  it,  though  it  was  hardly  from  his  lips  that  it 
could  come  with  propriety.  ' '  Christopher  North, ' '  he 
wrote,  **is  the  tutor,  the  guardian,  and  the  patron  of 
the  young  poets.  As  they  reverence  him,  they  pros- 
per— wanting  the  light  of  his  countenance,  they  sicken 
in  the  shade,  and  prematurely  die.  But  none  who 
deserve  it  want  the  light  of  the  countenance  of  the  old 
man  benign."  These  words  attracted  the  attention 
of  another  reviewer  who  was  at  that  very  time 
proclaiming  in  the  columns  of  'The  New  Monthly 
Magazine'  the  merits  of  a  young  and  but  little-known 
poet  whom  he  placed  by  the  side  of  Shelley  and 
Coleridge  and  Wordsworth.  This  reviewer  was  John 
Forster.  He  expostulated  with  his  '  *  esteemed  contem- 
porary," as  he  termed  the  critic  of  'Blackwood's 
Magazine.'  Accepting  him  at  his  own  valuation,  he 
called  upon  him  to  redeem  his  omission  of  a  poet  who 
was  both  young  and  great.  Why  had  he  not  mentioned 
Mr.  Browning,  he  asked?     "Here  is  a  young  poet," 


486  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

he  said,  ''or  rather — for  greatness  takes  no  account 
of  age — a  great  poet,  and  his  book  has  been  buzzed 
at  by  the  critics,  and  Christopher'  North  has  remained 
silent."  This  could  not  continue,  he  was  confident; 
the  reason  that  it  existed  at  all  he  suggested.  ''The 
old  man  eloquent,"  Forster  went  on  to  say,  "prepares 
himself  for  a  discourse  on  greatness  in  poetry,  as 
distinguished  from  the  'small  luminaries  now  in 
ascension';  and  the  illustration  shall  be  'Robert 
Browning.'  "^  But  Wilson  was  neither  moved  by  the 
flattery  nor  affected  by  the  appeal.  If  indeed  Tenny- 
son's poetry  was  not  in  the  range  of  his  adequate 
appreciation,  we  can  easily  understand  what  would 
be  his  attitude  towards  that  of  Robert  Browning.  No 
criticism  of  that  writer  ever  appeared  in  that  magazine 
while  Wilson  was  connected  with  it.  Not  even  his 
name  can  be  found  in  it  for  some  time  after  a  good 
deal  of  his  best  work  had  been  produced. 

Wilson  had  one  final  opportunity  to  demonstrate 
beyond  question  that  resentment  for  a  foolish  attack 
could  not  merely  blind  his  critical  judgment  but  cause 
him  to  display  a  crowning  ineptitude.  The  occasion 
came  to  him  in  1842.  It  was  duly  improved.  The  first 
part  of  that  year  had  seen  the  publication  of  Tenny- 
son's two  volumes.  Of  them  he  took  no  notice  what- 
ever. So  far  were  they  from  being  reviewed  at  the 
time  in  'Blackwood's  Magazine,'  not  even  was  the 
name  of  their  author  to  be  found  for  a  long  while 
anywhere  in  its  pages,  though  it  was  now  beginning 
to  be  heard  on  the  tongue  of  every  cultivated  man. 

1  Vol.  XLVI,  p.  308,  March,  1836. 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  LATER  ATTACKS  487 

But  in  the  latter  part  of  this  same  year  appeared 
Macaulay's  'Lays  of  Ancient  Rome.'  From  the  outset 
the  work  was  the  greatest  of  successes.  It  was  pub- 
lished in  October.  Before  the  end  of  December  it 
had  gone  into  a  second  edition,  speedily  to  be  followed 
by  a  third  the  foUo^ving  year.  These  were  the 
precursors  of  innumerable  others.  It  deserved  all 
the  success  it  won.  Nor  is  it  any  denial  of  its  excel- 
lence to  assert  that  no  competent  critic  would  now 
pretend  to  put  it  on  a  level  with  the  poetry  contained 
in  Tennyson's  two  volumes.  Under  ordinary  condi- 
tions there  would  have  been  no  one  quicker  than 
Wilson  to  recognize  that,  however  good  it  was,  it  was 
nevertheless  a  work  on  a  lower  plane  of  achievement. 
But  there  were  then  a  few  critics  who  ranked  it  higher. 
Chief  among  these  was  Christopher  North.  By  no  one 
was  it  welcomed  with  more  enthusiasm  than  by  him. 

Wilson  had  been  a  political  opponent  of  Macaulay. 
In  some,  too,  of  the  literary  controversies  in  which  the 
future  historian  had  been  engaged,  the  critic  had  taken 
him  sharply  to  task.  But  in  the  number  for  December, 
1842,^  he  rose,  at  least  in  his  own  opinion,  above  all 
purely  partisan  considerations.  He  sang  a  paean  in 
praise  of  the  'Lays  of  Ancient  Rome'  which  was  so 
remarkable  for  the  fervor  and  extravagance  of  its 
eulogy  that  it  ought  to  be  printed  alongside  of 
Matthew  Arnold's  later  disparagement.  But  though 
the  fact  is  forgotten  now,  and  perhaps  was  not  much 
noticed  then,  it  was  equally  remarkable  for  its  oblique 
depreciation    of    Tennyson.      There    was    really    no 

1  Vol.  LII,  p.  802. 


488  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

occasion  to  go  out  of  his  way  to  attack  compositions 
so  entirely  different  in  character  and  subject  from 
those  of  Macaulay  that  there  was  hardly  a  common 
ground  for  comparison.  Yet  this  was  the  very  course 
taken.  Tennyson's  name,  to  be  sure,  was  not  men- 
tioned in  Wilson's  article.  He  may  not  indeed  have 
been  the  only  one  the  critic  had  in  mind;  but  it  is 
indisputable  that  it  was  he  who  was  the  one  prin- 
cipally aimed  at  in  the  passages  celebrating  the 
superiority  of  Macaulay  to  the  Young  Poets,  as  he 
still  continued  disdainfully  to  designate  them.  These 
were  spoken  of  as  belonging  to  the  Small  Beer  School. 
''The  beer,"  he  said,  "may,  like  that  of  Trinity,  be 
a  very  pretty  beer,  but  it  ought  to  learn  to  take  things 
quietly,  and  be  less  ambitious." 

*'For  a  good  many  years,"  said  Wilson  later  in  the 
article,  ''have  we  been  praising  the  Young  Poets — 
not  without  a  sense  of  the  ludicrous,  patting  their 
puerile  heads.  .  .  .  Our  Young  Poets,  as  Fanny 
Kemble  used  to  say  of  herself  in  her  Journal,  potter, 
potter,  potter,  and  all  about  themselves;  morning, 
noon,  and  night,  they  potter,  potter,  potter  all  about 
their  own  dear,  sweet,  consumptive,  passionate,  small, 
infantile  selves — trying  at  times  to  look  fierce,  nay 
facetious — and  in  the  very  whirlwind  of  passion, 
sufficiently  tropical  to  lift  up  a  curl  tastefully  disposed 
on  their  organ  of  identity  three  inches  broad,  are  they 
seen  picking  obsolete-looking  words  out  of  a  pocket 
edition  of  Walker's  Pronouncing  Dictionary."  This 
and  much  more  like  this  can  be  found  in  the  article 
which  celebrated  the  superiority  of  Macaulay  to  these 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  LATER  ATTACKS  489 

young  poets.  It  is  a  striking  illustration  of  the  want 
of  discernment  wliicli  in  the  case  of  Tennyson  had 
come  to  overcloud  the  perspicacity  of  him  who  was 
generally  regarded  as  the  foremost  literary  critic  of 
the  time.  It  reminds  one  of  the  sort  of  judgment 
passed  on  Shakespeare  by  the  criticasters  of  the  period 
following  the  Restoration. 

This  however  was  the  last  outburst  of  a  like  character 
on  the  part  of  Wilson.  As  time  went  on  a  public 
opinion  was  forming  about  the  poet  which  he  with 
all  his  recklessness  and  hardihood  dared  no  longer 
defy — at  all  events  his  publisher  did  not.  Henceforth 
Wilson  did  not  venture  to  speak  of  Tennyson  in  the 
jaunty  way  in  which  he  had  at  first  patronized  him  or, 
to  use  his  own  phrase,  patted  his  head.  Nor  can  there 
be  much  doubt  that  susceptible  as  the  critic  was  to 
literary  achievement,  he  could  not  easily  refrain  from 
admiring  the  excellence  of  much  of  the  work  the  poet 
had  accomplished.  Scattered  through  the  pages  of 
the  magazine  during  the  years  following  the  appear- 
ance of  the  volumes  of  1842  are  a  few  references  to 
Tennyson  which  are  fairly  complimentary  in  their 
character,  though  none  are  unduly  so.  The  highest 
published  compliment  Wilson  ever  paid  the  poet  can 
be  found  in  what  is  on  the  whole  a  favorable  review 
of  Miss  Barrett's  works.^  This  appeared  in  November, 
1844.  While  making  as  a  matter  of  course  his  usual 
remarks  about  the  existing  dearth  of  poetical  genius, 
Wilson  gave  to  her  productions  high  and  discerning 
praise.     He  did  not  neglect  to  point  out  her  faults 

1 '  Blackwood 's  Magazine/  Vol.   LVI,  pp.   621-639. 


490  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

but  lie  treated  them  merely  as  blemishes.  He  further- 
more spoke  of  'Lady  Geraldine's  Courtship'  as  belong- 
ing to  the  Tennysonian  school.  This  was  a  discovery 
of  his  not  much  relished  by  the  authoress.  While  he 
accorded  the  poem  a  certain  amount  of  praise,  he 
declared  it  as  ''deficient  throughout  in  that  finished 
elegance  of  style  which  distinguishes  the  work  of  the 
great  artist  from  whom  it  is  imitated."  Tennyson 
had  not  been  advanced  by  him  to  the  rank  of  a  great 
poet :  but  he  had  got  along  far  enough  to  be  recognized 
as  a  great  artist. 

This  was  the  sole  instance  in  which  Wilson  wantoned 
into  anything  which  looked  like  extravagance  of 
admiration.  During  these  years  he  gave  a  grudging 
recognition  to  the  genius  of  Tennyson;  but  he  never 
abandoned  the  belief  that  while  he  was  what  he  had 
once  called  him,  a  true  poet,  he  was  by  no  means  a 
great  one.  His  criticisms  throughout  furnish  one  of 
the  most  striking  exemplifications  of  the  fact  that  a 
man  brought  up  in  one  school  of  poetry  is  often  found 
absolutely  incapable  of  appreciating  the  greatness  of 
a  writer  belonging  to  a  new  school.  Wilson  never 
ceased  to  deplore  the  falling  off  in  literary  achieve- 
ment from  the  men  of  the  Georgian  era  of  the  men 
belonging  to  the  Victorian  era.  "After  Scott's  time," 
he  wrote  in  1844,  "till  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth 
century  not  a  single  novelist ;  after  the  death  of  Byron, 
not  a  poet!"  The  belles-lettres  in  his  opinion  were 
utterly  in  abeyance.  "As  regards  the  state  of  litera- 
ture," he  remarked  in  another  place  in  this  same 
article,  "take  out  your  pencils  .  .  .  and  make  out  a 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  LATER  ATTACKS  491 

list  of  the  works  published  during  the  last  five  years, 
likely  to  be  known,  even  by  name,  a  hundred  years 
hence. "^  Wilson  ignored  the  poems  of  Tennyson;  he 
was  apparently  ignorant  of  the  existence  of  Browning ; 
he  seemed  to  forget  the  lays  of  Macaulay  over  which 
he  had  not  long  before  waxed  enthusiastic.  But  not 
to  speak  of  other  authors  in  prose,  three  novels  of 
Dickens — 'Nicholas  Nickleby,'  'The  Old  Curiosity 
Shop,'  and  'Barnaby  Rudge' — had  appeared  during 
the  five  years  preceding  as  well  as  a  good  deal  of  the 
early  work  of  Thackeray,  though  that  writer  had  not 
then  obtained  a  general  recognition  of  his  greatness. 
Fortunate  it  is  for  most  criticism  that  its  verdicts  and 
conclusions  sleep  unknown  and  undisturbed  in  the 
forgotten  pages  of  contemporary  periodicals. 

Yet  Wilson's  attitude  towards  the  writers  who  were 
coming  forward  to  take  the  place  of  their  elders  was 
not  different  from  that  of  many  of  those  who  belonged 
to  his  own  generation  or  the  one  immediately  succeed- 
ing. Insensibility  to  Tennyson's  claims  in  particular 
was  far  from  being  a  characteristic  peculiar  to  himself. 
But  the  sins  of  others  were  largely  due  to  pure 
unadulterated  ignorance.  They  knew  little,  or  often 
absolutely  nothing  of  the  literature  produced  by  the 
men  of  the  younger  generation.  It  is  quite  manifest 
from  his  biography  that  Macaulay,  at  the  time  just 
spoken  of  and  later,  had  never  looked  at  a  poem  of 
Tennyson's.  It  was  not  till  towards  the  close  of  his 
life  that  he  tells  us  that  the  reading  of  'Guinevere' 
in  the  'Idylls  of  the  King'  brought  tears  to  his  eyes. 

1 '  Blackwood 's  Magazine, '  May,  1844,  Vol.  LV,  p.  560. 


492  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

But  this  was  not  so  with  Wilson.  With  him  it  was 
not  lack  of  knowledge,  but  lack  of  appreciation;  or 
rather  the  disposition  not  to  appreciate  which  for 
years  he  had  been  sedulously  cultivating.  He  was 
perpetually  complaining  of  the  prevailing  dearth  of 
poetical  genius.  The  men  of  to-day  were  in  his  eyes 
very  respectable  men;  but  it  was  useless  to  compare 
them  with  the  men  of  the  immediate  past.  Wilson 
never  could  be  persuaded  that  the  best  of  the  poets 
then  on  the  stage  were  equal  to  the  poorest  of  the 
earlier  generation.  In  1844  a  German  traveller  records 
an  inter^dew  he  had  had  mth  him  while  in  Scotland. 
* '  It  seemed  to  me, ' '  he  wrote  in  his  report  of  it,  '  *  that 
the  Professor,  though  cheerful,  spoke  rather  hope- 
lessly of  the  rising  English  literature — and  especially 
of  the  young  poets.'"  To  this  view  his  own  direct 
utterances  conform.  *' Poetry  appears  for  the  time 
wellnigh  extinguished,"  he  wrote  in  1845.  *'We  have 
some  charming  ballads  from  Tennyson ;  some  touching 
lines  from  Miss  Barret ;  but  where  are  the  successors 
of  Scott  and  Byron,  of  Campbell  and  Southey?"^  A 
good  deal  can  be  said  for  the  introduction  of  the  first 
two  names;  but  the  bathos  of  critical  inbecility  is 
reached  when  Campbell  and  above  all  Southey  are 
reckoned  superior  to  Tennyson  and  Browning. 

This  doleful  state  of  mind  continued  on  Wilson's 
part  to  the  day  of  his  death.  As  late  as  April,  1850, 
he  expressed  the  same  sentiment  of  modified  despair 
in  a  review  of  'Festus.'    ''We  seem  to  have  amongst 

I'Tait's  Edinburgh  Magazine,'  October,  1844,  Vol.  XI,  p.  642. 
2 'Blackwood's  Magazine,'  September,  1845,  Vol.  LVIII,  p.  341, 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  LATER  ATTACKS  493 

us  good  poets  still,"  he  wrote,  **but  they  have  ceased 
to  produce  good  poems.  We  have  much  genuine 
poetry  diffused  through  our  literature,  and  not  a  new 
work  of  art  added  to  our  possessions."^  But  as  time 
went  on,  it  became  apparent  to  the  publisher  of 
*  Blackwood's  Magazine,'  if  it  did  not  to  its  leading 
contributor,  that  it  would  no  longer  do  for  a  periodical 
of  its  literary  pretensions  to  persist  in  ignoring  the 
claims  to  consideration  of  the  one  man  who  was  daily 
becoming  more  and  more  the  favorite  of  the  public. 
It  could  not  afford  to  content  itself  with  mere  refer- 
ences to  him  either  depreciatory  or  laudatory.  He 
was  a  new  force  that  had  to  be  reckoned  with.  He 
could  neither  be  pooh-poohed  nor  patronized.  The 
maintenance  of  silence  on  its  part  would  have  no  effect 
upon  the  reputation  of  Tennyson  but  would  have  a 
good  deal  upon  that  of  the  magazine.  So  in  April, 
1849,  seven  years  after  the  publication  of  the  two 
volumes  of  poems,  and  a  little  more  than  a  year  after 
the  publication  of  'The  Princess,'  came  out  a  belated 
review  of  both  productions.^  It  was  on  the  whole  very 
complimentary.  In  fact  such  was  getting  to  be  the 
temperament  of  the  public  that  it  was  becoming  a 
somewhat  risky  procedure  for  either  reviewer  or 
review  to  be  otherwise.  There  was  accordingly  a 
respectful  tone  preserved  throughout  towards  the  poet, 
even  where  an  unfavorable  opinion  was  expressed  of 
particular  pieces. 

1  ' Blackwood 's  Magazine,'  Vol,  LXVII,  p.  416. 

2  IMd.,  Vol.  LXV,  pp.  453-467. 


494  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

But  along  with  its  laudatory  passages  the  review 
was  a  good  deal  disfigured  by  the  offensive  assumption 
of  that  highly  superior  attitude  on  the  part  of  the 
critic  who  makes  it  a  point  to  find  unendurable  what 
the  vast  majority  of  cultivated  men  have  learned  to 
love.  The  verdict,  however,  pronounced  on  particular 
pieces  shows  conclusively  that  Wilson  had  no  hand 
in  the  article  either  in  the  way  of  composition  or 
correction.  Its  opinions  w^ere  directly  contrary  to 
those  he  had  previously  expressed.  He  had  been 
enthusiastic  about  the  'Ode  to  Memory'  which  the 
general  voice  has  always  regarded  as  one  of  the  finest 
poems  of  Tennyson's  first  volume.  He  had  described 
it  as  eminently  beautiful.  Not  so  felt  the  succeeding 
critic  in  the  same  magazine.  In  one  place  he  spoke 
of  it  as  incomprehensible.  In  another  he  described 
it  as  a  poem  ''which  craves  to  be  extinguished,  which 
ought  in  charity  to  be  forgotten."  He  succinctly 
described  it  as  an  utter  failure.  "We  cannot  read  it 
again,"  he  continued,  "to  enable  us  to  speak  quite 
positively,  but  we  do  not  think  there  is  a  single 
redeeming  line  in  the  whole  of  it."  'Mariana,'  too, 
which  Wilson  had  quoted  in  its  entirety  for  its 
profound  pathos,  was  condemned  as  was  also  'Oriana,' 
which  he  had  characterized  as  perhaps  the  most 
beautiful  of  Tennyson's  ballad  compositions.  There 
is  always  a  certain  interest  in  the  resuscitation  of 
these  dead  and  buried  specimens  of  asinine  criticism. 
For  this  reason  it  may  be  well  to  rescue  from  the 
grave  to  which  they  have  been  consigned  the  remarks 


CHRISTOPHER  NORTH'S  LATER  ATTACKS  495 

here  found  on  one  of  the  most  famous  of  the  poems 
of  the  second  volume  which  Wilson  never  reviewed. 
In  it  Tennyson  is  spoken  of  as  ''torturing  himself  to 
unite  old  balladry  with  modern  sentiment  in  his  Lady 
of  Shallott,  forever  rhyming  with  that  detested  town 
of  Camelot." 

For  such  exhibitions  of  crass  incompetence  of 
appreciation  Wilson  can  be  fully  absolved.  But  he 
never  broke  his  silence  about  Tennyson.  We  talk  of 
the  sensitiveness  of  authors.  Can  anything  be  shown 
surpassing  this  display  of  it  by  him  whom  no  small 
number  of  cultivated  readers  looked  upon  as  the  first 
critic  of  his  time  ?  Wilson  did  not  die  until  1854.  His 
connection  "with  'Blackwood's  Magazine,'  though 
naturally  becoming  less  close  with  the  advance  of  age, 
did  not  cease  entirely  until  1852,  when  the  last  con- 
tribution from  his  pen  came  out  in  its  September 
number.  During  the  half-score  years  which  preceded 
his  retirement  the  fame  of  Tennyson  had  been  steadily 
rising  and  broadening.  New  editions  of  the  'Poems' 
of  1842  were  coming  out  with  increasing  frequency. 
The  whole  English-speaking  world  had  their  eyes  fixed 
upon  everything  and  anything  which  came  from  his 
pen.  'The  Princess'  of  1847  had  been  followed  by 
the  'In  Memoriam'  of  1850.  The  publication  of  the 
latter  volume  had  been  the  great  literary  event  of  the 
year.  Acclaim  practically  universal  had  attended  a 
few  months  later  the  appointment  of  its  author  to  the 
poet  laureateship.  But  during  all  these  years  inci- 
dental references  to  Tennyson — and  they  not  numer- 


496  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

ous — are  all  that  the  once  catholic  critic  thought  fit 
to  make.  To  the  very  last  Wilson  did  all  that  lay  in 
his  power  to  justify  the  application  to  himself  of  the 
epithets  of  ''crusty,  rusty,  musty,  fusty  Christopher,'* 
by  which  he  had  been  designated. 


CHAPTER  XIX 
TENNYSON'S  PENSION  AND  BULWER'S  ATTACK 

Frequently  has  it  been  said  that  the  success  of  the 
'Poems'  of  1842  was  both  immediate  and  unmeasured; 
that  Tennyson  leaped  at  once  into  universal  accept- 
ance. Such  an  assertion  would  be  very  far  from 
conforming  to  fact.  The  truth  is  that  the  growth  of 
Tennyson's  reputation  after  the  appearance  of  these 
volumes,  while  in  one  sense  rapid,  was  in  another 
gradual.  It  could  not  well  have  been  otherwise.  Both 
in  thought  and  expression  his  poetic  utterance  was 
widely  different  from  anything  which  had  gone  before. 
If  it  had  a  resemblance  to  the  utterance  of  any  preced- 
ing poet,  it  was  to  that  of  Keats ;  and  at  that  time,  so 
far  as  the  mass  of  even  educated  men  was  concerned, 
Keats  had  not  yet  become  a  potent  factor  in  English 
literature.  The  poetry  of  Tennyson  accordingly,  as 
it  was  of  a  distinctly  new  type,  was  in  its  nature 
revolutionary;  and  like  all  things  revolutionary  had 
to  fight  its  way  to  general  acceptance.  It  found  at 
once,  it  is  true,  a  large  body  of  admirers,  who  were 
not  at  all  under  the  bondage  of  the  past.  But  those 
who  had  been  brought  up  in  the  admiration  and  enjoy- 
ment of  the  utterance  of  other  poetic  schools — and 
necessarily  to  this  class  belonged  a  large  body  of 
highly  cultivated  men — were  disposed  to  look  askance 


498  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

upon  this  new  aspirant  who  had  a  most  distinct  manner 
of  his  own  and  a  manner  to  which  they  were  not  in 
the  slightest  degree  accustomed.  Their  prejudices 
gave  way  slowly.  They  were  reluctant  to  concede  that 
a  new  literary  dynasty  had  been  established,  that  a 
new  literary  monarch  had  arisen.  To  him  they  were 
little  disposed  to  pay  their  allegiance. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  men  of  the  old  school  were 
a  good  deal  astounded  by  the  welcome  which  Tenny- 
son's poetry  had  received  and  by  the  enthusiasm  with 
which  his  partisans  hailed  him.  They  were  usually 
puzzled  by  it  and  occasionally  made  indignant.  These 
poems,  so  highly  praised,  did  not  impress  them  favor- 
ably in  most  cases ;  in  some  cases  they  impressed  them 
very  unfavorably.  Readers  of  Thackeray  will  recall 
how  amazed  and  bewildered  was  Colonel  Newcome  by 
the  opinions  he  heard  expressed  on  his  return  to 
England  after  thirty  years  spent  in  India.  They  were 
not  the  opinions  of  his  time.  He  learned  from  the 
men  who  were  his  son's  companions  that  young  Keats 
was  a  genius  to  be  estimated  in  future  days  with  young 
Raphael,  and  that  a  young  gentleman  at  Cambridge 
who  had  lately  published  two  volumes  of  verses  might 
take  rank  with  the  greatest  poets  of  all.  He  tried  in 
vain  to  construe  'CEnone.'  Though  he  understood 
'Ulysses,'  he  could  not  see  any  sense  in  the  prodigious 
laudations  it  received.  Thackeray,  writing  in  the 
sixth  decade  of  the  century,  can  be  forgiven  for  his 
anachronism;  for  the  time  of  this  part  of  his  novel 
is  that  of  the  fourth  decade  and  one  of  the  two  works 
he  specifies  and  all  the  sentiments  he  records  belong 


TENNYSON'S  PENSION  499 

to  the  fifth.  But  for  that  last  period  they  represent 
accurately  the  feelings  prevalent  among  the  men  of 
the  younger  generation  and  the  bemlderment  and 
frequently  the  disquiet  of  those  of  the  older. 

Still,  all  great  work  in  art  steadily  rises  in  estima- 
tion under  constant  examination.  The  converts  that 
Tennyson  made,  he  kept.  They  belonged,  furthermore, 
to  the  class  whose  influence  was  grooving  steadily ;  and 
the  effect  of  their  appreciation  showed  itself  in  a 
rapidly  enlarging  circle  of  admirers.  Before  the 
earnest  advocacy  of  these,  indifference  and  hostility 
rapidly  gave  way.  The  changing  attitude  of  this  band 
of  readers  who  began  with  a  prejudice  against  the 
poet  can  be  seen  faithfully  reflected  in  the  correspond- 
ence of  Mary  Russell  Mitford.  Her  letters  re-echo  at 
first  all  the  critical  platitudes  about  Tennyson  which 
had  been  current  during  the  preceding  ten  years  of 
silence.  ''Do  you  know  Alfred  Tennyson's  poems?" 
she  wrote  to  one  of  her  friends  on  the  eighth  of  June, 
1842.  ''They  are  in  the  last  degree  mannered  and 
obscure  (I  always  doubt  if  these  dark  people  know 
their  own  meaning),  still  some  of  his  things,  especially 
'Mariana  in  the  Moated  Grange,'  have  great  merit, 
so  that  I  have  been  pleased  at  finding  one  of  the 
best  of  the  new  poems  taken  avowedly  '  from  a  pastoral 
of  Miss  Mitford 's,'  'Dora  Creswell.' "  Before  a 
year  had  gone  by,  this  patronizing  appreciation  had 
changed  into  enthusiastic  admiration.  She  then  had 
learned  to  prefer  Tennyson  to  any  poet  of  the  age. 
On  the  twenty-seventh  of  February,  1843,  she  commu- 
nicated to  this  same  friend  certain  facts  about  the 


500  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

success  of  his  work.  ' '  Dear  Miss  Barrett, ' '  she  wrote, 
''whose  health  is  better,  has  a  volume  ready,  but  no 
bookseller  will  incur  the  risk  of  publishing  poetry. 
Moxon  says  that  he  has  lost  by  every  one  except  Alfred 
Tennyson;  to  be  sure,  the  exception  proves  a  growing 
taste  for  high  poetry,  for  I  think  his  three  lovely 
volumes  the  most  delicious  that  have  appeared  for 
many  years.  Indeed  I  know  nothing  in  modern  times 
equal  to  'Mariana,'  'The  Sleeping  Beauty'  and 
'Locksley  Hall.'  " 

If  this  remark  of  Moxon  be  accurate  as  well  as 
accurately  reported,  and  not  subject  to  that  modifica- 
tion which  it  is  frequently  desirable  to  make  in  the 
statements  of  the  most  scrupulous  publisher,  it  does 
give  a  somewhat  gloomy  view  of  the  fondness  for 
verse  then  prevalent;  for  Moxon  had  brought  out  or 
was  bringing  out  the  works  of  the  most  eminent  poets 
of  the  day;  at  least  of  the  generation  just  going  off 
the  stage,  like  Wordsworth  and  Campbell  and  Rogers, 
as  well  as  of  the  younger  men  like  Henry  Taylor  and 
Trench  and  Browning.  His  views  of  what  constituted 
success  could  indeed  have  been  hardly  deemed  extrava- 
gant, for  the  edition  he  had  just  about  disposed  of 
consisted,  as  we  have  seen,  of  but  eight  hundred  copies. 
The  sale,  to  be  sure,  was  steadily  going  on;  yet  it 
took  two  years  more  to  exhaust  the  thousand  copies 
of  the  second  edition.  As  a  consequence  of  so  doing, 
it  became  necessary  to  bring  out  a  third,  which 
appeared  duly  in  the  middle  of  June,  1845.  This 
consisted  of  an  unrecorded  but  manifestly  larger 
number  of  copies.    In  July,  1846,  Browning  wrote  to 


TENNYSON'S  PENSION  501 

the  woman  soon  to  become  his  wife  that  he  had  been 
that  morning  mth  Moxon.  The  publisher  told  him 
that  he  had  sold  fifteen  hundred  of  Tennyson's  'Poems' 
during  the  year  and  that  he  was  about  to  bring  out 
another  edition  in  consequence/ 

But  while  such  a  number  was  respectable,  and  even 
seems  large,  as  the  sale  of  poetry  of  a  high  grade  went 
then,  while  indeed  it  proved  that  the  reputation  of 
Tennyson  had  already  begun  to  overshadow  that  of 
his  contemporaries,  it  is  obvious  that  at  this  rate  it 
was  hopeless  to  entertain  expectations  of  pecuniary 
support  from  that  source.  As  if  this  were  not  enough, 
a  new  embarrassment  was  now  added  to  the  poet's 
situation.  His  means  had  been  far  from  ample  to 
start  on ;  but  such  as  they  were,  they  had  now  become 
largely  dissipated  by  an  injudicious  investment.  He 
had  been  led  to  take  part  in  one  of  those  alluring 
enterprises  which,  occasionally  crowned  with  great 
success,  ordinarily  result  in  dismal  failure.  This 
instance  proved  no  exception  to  the  general  rule. 
Resident  near  the  family  at  High  Beech  was  a 
physician,  a  certain  Dr.  Matthew  Allen,  described  by 
Carlyle  as  a  '^  speculative,  hopeful,  earnest-frothy 
man."  He  had  become  interested  in  a  scheme  which 
he  had  invented  or  adopted  for  making  oak  furniture 
by  machinery.  The  enterprise  was  to  be  both  philan- 
thropic and  pecuniarily  profitable,  two  results  which 
are  not  often  easy  to  harmonize,  at  least  at  the  outset. 
It  was  expected  that  by  the  process  such  furniture 
could  be  put  within  the  means  of  all,  besides  securing 

1 '  Browning  Letters, '  Vol.  II,  p.  335. 


502  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

the  fortunes  of  those  concerned  in  promoting  it.  In 
this  enterprise  the  enthusiastic  physician  succeeded 
in  gaining  the  co-operation  of  the  Tennysons.  Espe- 
cially was  this  true  of  the  poet.  He  invested  in  it  the 
proceeds  of  a  little  estate  in  Grasby,  Lincolnshire,  and 
a  legacy  of  five  hundred  pounds  left  him  by  an  aunt 
of  Arthur  Hallam.  The  scheme  collapsed  entirely, 
necessarily  with  disastrous  results  to  Tennyson's 
means.  The  blow  was  to  some  extent  broken  by  his 
brother-in-law,  Edmund  Lushington,  insuring  in  1844 
Dr.  Allen's  life  for  a  portion  of  the  debt  due  to  the 
poet.  The  physician  on  his  part  atoned,  so  far  as  lay 
in  his  power,  for  the  misfortune  he  had  caused,  by 
obligingly  dying  in  January,  1845. 

Consequently,  while  the  literary  prospects  of  Tenny- 
son were  brightening,  his  pecuniary  prospects,  never 
up  to  this  time  brilliant,  were  perceptibly  darkened. 
Still  less  than  ever  was  he  in  a  position  of  independ- 
ence. To  a  man  who  desired  to  devote  himself  to  the 
pursuit  of  literature  pure  and  simple,  the  outlook  for 
the  future  could  hardly  have  failed  to  seem  peculiarly 
disheartening.  His  feelings  during  this  period  are 
portrayed  in  a  letter  to  a  friend  written  after  the 
receipt  of  his  pension  in  October,  1845.  **I  have 
gone,"  he  said,  'Hhro'  a  vast  deal  of  suffering  (as  to 
money  difficulties  in  my  family  etc.)  since  I  saw  you 
last,  and  would  not  live  it  over  again  for  quadruple 
the  pension  Peel  has  given  me.  "^  Personal  troubles 
were  added  to  pecuniary.  The  correspondence  with 
her  who  was   subsequently  to  become  his  wife  had 

1' Memoir,'  Vol.  I,  p.  226. 


TENNYSON'S  PENSION  503 

been  for  years  forbidden.  The  prospect  of  marriage 
had  been  poor  enough  before.  Still  less  was  there 
now  anything  to  justify  the  belief  that  he  would  be 
in  a  position  to  support  a  family.  Troubles  afilicting 
either  the  heart  or  the  pocket-book  are  never  conducive 
to  vigor.  Coming  together,  they  affected  Tennyson's 
physical  condition  so  seriously  that  we  are  told  that 
his  friends  despaired  of  the  continuance  of  his  life.^ 
Hypochondria  had  set  in  with  all  its  morbid  anxieties 
about  health  and  its  utter  depression  of  spirits. 
Reports  about  him  and  his  condition  are  conflicting 
in  the  correspondence  of  the  period.  At  one  time 
they  are  favorable,  at  another  time  they  are  unfavor- 
able. We  know  that  in  1844  he  resorted  for  a  while 
to  a  hydropathic  establishment  at  Cheltenham.  This 
same  method  of  re-establishing  his  health  he  tried 
years  later. 

The  mention  by  Tennyson  of  his  pension  brings  to 
the  front  the  question  of  the  agency  by  which  it  was 
secured.  Wliile  the  tributes  that  were  increasingly 
paid  to  his  eminence  were  unquestionably  agreeable, 
they  were  not  of  a  nature  to  contribute  to  his  support, 
save  indirectly.  As  the  earnest  desire  existed  among 
his  friends,  who  were  also  friends  to  literature,  that 
he  should  have  the  means  to  give  himself  up  to  his 
life-work,  undisturbed  by  pecuniary  anxieties,  they 
conceived  the  idea  of  securing  him  a  pension  from  the 
Literary  Fund  at  the  disposal  of  the  government. 
In  this  they  were  eventually  successful.  One  story 
of  the  way  in  which  it  was  secured — the  one  commonly 

1' Memoir,'  Vol.  I,  p.  221. 


504  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

accepted — was  told  by  Wemyss  Reid  in  his  life  of 
Lord  Houghton.  As  given  there,  it  has  been  adopted, 
too,  in  what  may  be  called  the  official  biography  of  the 
poet  by  his  son,  who  himself  heard  more  than  once 
the  details  recited  in  the  presence  of  his  father. 
Accordingly,  it  may  seem  to  have  received  the  sanction 
of  the  latter ;  that  he  accepted  as  true  all  that  is  implied 
by  it.  At  any  rate,  the  account  deserves  not  merely 
relation  but  precedence. 

Among  the  friends  of  the  poet  who  were  most 
earnest  in  the  movement  for  securing  the  pension 
was  Carlyle.  He  found  in  Tennyson,  as  he  wrote  to 
Emerson,  one  of  the  few  figures  ''who  are  and  remain 
beautiful  to  me."  "I  do  not,"  he  said  further  in  the 
same  letter,  "meet  in  these  late  decades  such  company 
over  a  pipe."  As  early  as  October,  1844,  he  had 
written  to  FitzGerald  that  "it  has  struck  me  as  a 
distinctly  necessary  Act  of  Legislation  that  Alfred 
should  have  a  Pension  of  £150  a  year."'  FitzGerald 
undoubtedly  sympathized  with  this  view ;  but  he  could 
not  furnish  any  help.  Naturally  Carlyle  turned  to 
quarters  more  likely  to  be  of  influence  in  securing  the 
result.  He  it  was  who  one  day  in  his  home  at  Cheyne 
Row  addressed  one  of  Tennyson's  friends,  who  was 
a  member  of  Parliament,  and  was  supposed  to  have 
some  influence  with  the  prime  minister. 

"Milnes,"  said  he,  as  he  took  his  pipe  out  of  his 
mouth,  "when  are  you  going  to  get  that  pension  for 
Alfred  Tennyson?" 

1 '  New  Letters  of  Thomaa  Carlyle, '  edited  by  Alexander  Carlyle, 
Vol.  I,  p.  322. 


TENNYSON'S  PENSION  505 

*'My  dear  Caiiyle,"  answered  Milnes,  ''the  thing 
is  not  so  easy  as  you  seem  to  suppose.  What  ^vill  my 
constituents  say  if  I  do  get  the  pension  for  Tennyson? 
They  know  nothing  about  him  or  his  poetry,  and  they 
will  probably  think  he  is  some  poor  relation  of  my  own, 
and  that  the  whole  affair  is  a  job." 

"Richard  Milnes,"  replied  Carlyle  solemnly,  '*on 
the  Day  of  Judgment  when  the  Lord  asks  you  why 
you  didn't  get  that  pension  for  Alfred  Tennyson,  it 
vnll  not  do  to  lay  the  blame  on  your  constituents;  it 
is  you  that  will  be  damned." 

Milnes  according  to  this  account  had  not  needed  any 
entreaties  to  spur  him  to  the  effort.  A  pension  of 
£200  was  available.  Application  had  already  been 
made  to  Sir  Robert  Peel  to  bestow  it  upon  two  different 
persons.  One  was  Tennyson,  the  other  the  veteran 
dramatist,  James  Sheridan  Knowles.  The  latter  was 
now  over  sixty  years  of  age,  and  though  his  plays  had 
in  general  been  successful,  he  was  far  from  being  in 
affluent  circumstances.  Peel  applied  to  Llilnes  for 
advice,  accompanying  his  request  with  the  remark  that 
he  knew  absolutely  nothing  about  either  man. 

"What,"  said  Milnes,  "have  you  never  seen  the 
name  of  Sheridan  Knowles  on  a  playbill?" 

"No,"  was  Peel's  answer. 

"And  have  you  never  read  a  poem  of  Tennyson's!" 
Again  the  answer  was  "No."  At  Peel's  request  that 
he  should  enable  him  to  see  something  which  Tennyson 
had  written,  Milnes  sent  him  'Locksley  Hall'  and 
'Ulysses.'  How  he  managed  to  do  it  without  sending 
him  the  volume  containing  the  rest  of  the  poems  we 


506  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

are  not  told.  With  these  pieces  went  a  letter  in  which 
Milnes  said  that  if  the  pension  was  granted  as  an  act 
of  charity,  it  should  go  to  Knowles,  who  was  infirm 
as  well  as  advanced  in  years;  if,  on  the  contrary,  in 
the  interests  of  English  literature  and  the  English 
nation,  it  should  be  given  to  Tennyson. 

That  Peel  should  never  have  read  at  that  time  a 
poem  of  Tennyson's,  however  much  it  may  have 
surprised  Milnes,  would  have  been  in  itself  far  from 
surprising.  Very  few  men  of  his  years,  occupied  as 
he  constantly  was  with  the  consideration  of  great 
political  questions,  have  the  leisure,  even  if  they  have 
the  desire,  to  keep  up  with  the  literature  which  has 
sprung  up  during  their  absorption  in  affairs  of  state. 
If  they  maintain  their  acquaintance  with  any  literature 
at  all,  it  is  fairly  certain  to  be  that  with  w^hich  they 
have  become  familiar  in  earlier  years.  Occasional 
exceptions  may  be  found.  Of  Peel  himself  it  is 
reported  that  he  made  it  a  point  of  learning  a  verse 
every  night  before  he  went  to  bed,  to  take  away,  he 
said,  the  taste  of  the  House  of  Commons.^  If  so,  he 
had  never  lost  his  appreciation  of  poetry  as  poetry. 
Furthermore,  we  learn  from  his  correspondence  that 
he  was  well  acquainted  with  the  writings  of  contem- 
porary English  authors,  of  whom  it  would  be  natural 
to  suppose  he  knew  little  or  nothing.  In  November, 
1844,  in  placing  a  sum  of  the  public  money  at  the 
disposal  of  the  dying  Hood,  he  assured  that  author 
that  ' '  There  can  be  little  which  you  have  written  that 
I  have  not  read." 

1  'Notes  from  a  Diary,  1892-1895,'  by  Sir  Mountstuart  E.  Grant  Duff, 
1904,  Vol.  II,  p.  8. 


TENNYSON'S  PENSION  507 

Still  it  would  be  in  no  mse  surprising  that  a  man 
like  liim,  constantly  engaged  in  political  strife,  should 
never  have  read  any  of  Tennyson's  productions.  Well 
known  as  the  poet's  name  had  become  to  the  men  of 
the  younger  generation,  it  was  positively  unknown 
to  many  of  the  older.  Of  the  insensibility  of  the  men 
of  this  older  generation  to  what  was  going  on  before 
their  eyes,  of  their  ignorance  of  it,  there  are  plenty 
of  illustrations.  In  Macaulay's  diary  for  March  9, 
1850,  occurs,  for  instance,  this  extraordinary  prophecy, 
* '  It  is  odd, ' '  he  wrote,  ' '  that  the  last  twenty-five  years, 
which  have  witnessed  the  greatest  progress  ever 
made  in  physical  science — ^the  greatest  victories  ever 
achieved  by  man  over  matter — should  have  produced 
hardly  a  volume  that  will  be  remembered  in  1900." 
A  little  later  in  the  same  year  we  find  him  writing  to 
Henry  Taylor  in  acknowledgment  of  the  reception  of 
that  dramatist's  play  of  'The  Virgin  Widow.'  He 
spoke  of  it  as  being  what  its  author  had  meant  it  to 
be — cheerful,  graceful,  and  gentle.  ''Nevertheless," 
he  continued,  "  'Philip  Van  Artevelde'  is  still,  in  my 
opinion,  the  best  poem  that  the  last  thirty  years  have 
produced;  and  I  wish  that  you  would  deprive  it  of 
that  pre-eminence,  a  feat  which  nobody  but  j'ourself 
seems  likely  to  accomplish."^  Could  a  more  suggestive 
illustration  be  furnished  of  the  worthlessness  of  con- 
temporary criticism  of  the  productions  of  the  imagi- 
nation? The  quarter  of  the  century,  whose  intellectual 
poverty  was   so   strongly  pointed  out  by  Macaulay, 

1  Letter  dated  from  the  Albany,  June  6,  1850,  '  Correspondence  of 
Sir  Henry  Taylor,'  p.  188, 


508  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

had  witnessed  the  production  of  much  of  the  best 
work  of  both  Tennyson  and  Browning  in  poetry;  of 
Dickens  and  Thackeray  and  Carlyle  in  prose;  not  to 
speak  of  no  small  number  of  writers  like  Bulwer, 
Disraeli,  Kingsley,  and  others  who  still  continue  to 
be  remembered  and  read. 

Accordingly,  if  a  man  like  Macaulay,  whose  interests 
lay  primarily  in  literature,  was  utterly  unfamiliar 
with  Tennyson's  poetry  in  1850,  Peel  can  hardly  be 
blamed  if  several  years  earlier  he  had  never  even 
heard  of  his  existence.  Yet  there  is  evidence  that  a 
long  while  before  the  pension  was  conferred  upon  the 
poet,  the  statesman  was  acquainted  with  his  name,  if 
not  with  his  writings.  On  the  death  of  Southey  in 
1843,  Fanny  Kemble,  at  the  instigation  of  Bryan 
Waller  Procter,  had  written  to  Lord  Francis  Egerton, 
later  Earl  of  Ellesmere,  to  engage  his  interest  in 
securing  for  Tennyson  the  post  of  poet  laureate.  The 
reason  she  gave  for  her  application  was  the  somewhat 
distressful  circumstances  in  which  the  poet  had  been 
left  by  the  failure  of  Dr.  Allen's  scheme  for  wood- 
carving.  Procter  indeed  had  told  her  that  Tennyson 
had  been  ''utterly  ruined"  by  it.  The  nobleman  to 
whom  she  applied,  informed  her  that  he  had  discovered 
that  Wordsworth  had  already  been  selected  for  the 
position.  On  March  31,  he  added,  however,  ''a 
suggestion  of  Sir  Robert  Peel's,  involving  a  palliation 
of  Mr.  T.'s  complaint.'"  What  the  ''palliation"  was 
is  not  specified,  but  it  was  probably  the  same  which, 
as  we  shall  see,  was  later  offered  through  Hallam  and 

1 '  Memories  of  the  Tennysons, '  by  H.  D.  Rawnsley,  p.  89. 


TENNYSON'S  PENSION  509 

not  accepted.  It  is  a  reasonable  inference  from  this 
communication  that  Peel  had  even  then  some  knowl- 
edge of  the  poet  and  his  writings.  At  all  events,  his 
correspondence,  as  published,  renders  it  necessary  to 
receive  Milnes's  statements  about  the  prime  minister's 
ignorance  with  certain  grains  of  allowance,  if  not  to 
revise  them  altogether.  Other  friends  besides  him 
were  certainly  active,  other  agencies  were  at  work 
besides  his  tow^ards  securing  the  pension.  It  ought  to 
be  added  that  it  was  secured  without  Tennyson's 
privity  or  co-operation,  as  had  been  the  previous 
application  of  Fanny  Kemble.  '^  Something  in  that 
word  'pension'  sticks  in  my  gizzard,"  he  wrote  not 
long  after  its  reception;  ''it  is  only  the  name,  and 
perhaps  would  'smell  sweeter'  by  some  other."  But 
he  had  the  consolation  of  feeling  that  it  had  been 
secured  for  him  by  others,  and  not  by  any  efforts 
of  his  o^vn.  "I  have  done  nothing  slavish  to  get  it," 
he  wrote  to  one  of  his  friends ;  "  I  never  even  solicited 
for  it  either  by  myself  or  thro'  others."^  Further- 
more, he  had  been  assured  by  the  prime  minister  in 
offering  it  that  he  need  not  be  hindered  by  it  in  the 
public  expression  of  any  opinion  he  chose  to  adopt. 

So  far  as  can  be  gathered  from  Peel's  correspond- 
ence, it  was  not  Milnes,  but  Henry  Hallam  who  first 
called  his  attention  to  both  the  merits  and  the  needs 
of  the  poet.^  On  the  eleventh  of  February,  1845,  the 
historian  wrote  a  letter  to  the  prime  minister  on  the 
subject  of  securing  a  pension  for  Tennyson,  "whose 

1' Memoir,'  Vol.  I,  p.  227, 

2  Sir  Robert  Peel,  from  his  Private  Papers,  London,  1899,  Vol.  HI, 
pp.  439-442. 


510  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

name,"  he  added,  "must  be  familiar  to  you,  even  if 
you  have  never  looked  at  his  writings.  Perhaps  I  do 
not  overstate  the  fact  when  I  say  that  he  is  considered 
by  many  as  the  very  first  among  the  younger  class  of 
living  poets.  He  is  at  least  a  man  of  a  fertile  and 
thoughtful  mind,  and  few  would  hesitate  to  ascribe 
to  him  the  high  praise  of  genius."  Hallam  then  went 
on  to  refer  Peel  to  Rogers  and  to  Henry  Taylor  for 
their  estimate  of  the  man  in  whose  behalf  he  was 
writing.  He  could  easily  mention  others,  he  said, 
**Mr.  Milnes,  for  example,  whose  judgment  in  poetry 
deserves  considerable  regard."  He  concluded  his 
letter  with  observing  that  Tennyson  was  by  no  means 
prosperous  in  worldly  circumstances,  but  much  the 
reverse. 

Four  days  later  Peel  replied  to  this  application.  It 
is  evident  from  his  words  that  he  was  favorably 
disposed  towards  the  request  but  lacked  the  means 
to  comply  with  it.  Furthermore,  we  have  his  own 
assurance  that  Tennyson's  poetry  was  not  at  that 
time  wholly  unfamiliar  to  him,  though  there  is  nothing 
to  show  when  or  how  he  first  became  acquainted  with 
it.  * '  I  have  read, ' '  he  wrote, ' '  some  of  Mr.  Tennyson 's 
works  and  have  formed  a  very  high  estimate  of  his 
powers."  The  words  italicized  were  italicized  by  the 
prime  minister  himself.  He  added,  however,  that  he 
had  no  means  for  making  any  permanent  provision 
for  the  poet.  Every  shilling,  he  said,  of  the  miserable 
pittance  granted  by  the  Crown  for  Civil  List  pensions 
had  been  appropriated.  He  could,  however,  relieve 
any  temporary  embarrassment  from  a  very  limited 


TENNYSON'S  PENSION  511 

public  fund  occasionally  used  for  the  relief  of  men 
of  letters.  Out  of  this  he  could  grant  Tennyson  £200, 
and  would  do  so  if  acceptable  to  his  feelings.  Mani- 
festly it  was  not  acceptable  to  his  feelings,  or  to  the 
feelings  of  Hallam.  Such  a  gift  would  imply  a 
necessity  which  did  not  exist.  So  the  matter  slumbered 
for  seven  months. 

But  Peel  neither  lost  sight  of  the  poet  nor  forgot 
Hallam 's  application  in  the  poet's  behalf.  On  the 
twenty-first  of  September,  he  wrote  to  the  historian 
that  he  now  had  at  his  disposal  £400  for  pensions. 
Two  hundred  of  this  he  was  purposing  to  grant  to 
Professor  James  Da\dd  Forbes,  of  the  University  of 
Edinburgh,  for  the  services  he  had  rendered  to  science. 
Then  he  went  on  to  speak  of  Tennyson.  ' '  The  impres- 
sions left  on  my  mind  by  the  poems,"  he  wrote, 
''confirmed  as  they  are  by  the  highest  testimonies  I 
could  receive  in  his  favour — your  o^vn  and  that  of 
Mr.  Rogers — will  induce  me,  should  it  be  agreeable 
to  Mr.  Tennyson,  to  submit  his  name  to  the  Queen, 
with  my  humble  recommendation  to  her  Majesty  that 
a  pension  of  2001.  per  annum  should  be  granted  to 
him  for  his  life."  Hallam  replied  the  following  day, 
thanking  Peel  warmly.  In  it  he  spoke  of  Tennyson 
as  ''a  man  of  great  poetical  genius,  and  one,  as  I  can 
add,  of  almost  chivalrous  honour  and  purity  of 
character;  and  that  you  will  have  the  response  of 
applause  from  the  lovers  of  poetry,  especially  the 
younger  of  both  sexes,  who  regard  Tennyson  as  the 
first  name  among  the  later  cultivators  of  that  sacred 
field. ' '    Hallam  at  once  communicated  the  information 


512  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

to  the  poet ;  and  Tennyson  wrote  to  the  minister  from 
Cheltenham  on  the  twenty-ninth  of  tliis  same  month 
gratefully  accepting  the  offer.  On  the  first  of  October, 
Peel  informed  him  of  his  intention  to  advise  the  Crown 
to  confer  this  mark  of  royal  favor  '*on  one  who  has 
devoted  to  worthy  purposes  great  intellectual  powers." 
On  the  fifteenth  of  this  same  month  the  pension  was 
granted. 

From  the  account  which  has  just  been  given,  two 
facts  become  evident.  One  is  that  Milnes's  could  not 
have  been  the  only  agency,  hardly  even  the  principal 
agency,  in  securing  the  pension  for  the  poet.  He  may 
indeed  have  been  the  first  to  call  the  attention  of  the 
prime  minister  to  the  matter,  possibly  in  conversation ; 
for  no  contemporary  record  of  his  efforts  has  so  far 
appeared  in  print.  In  this  way  the  account  of  his 
action  given  in  his  biography  may  be  harmonized  with 
the  facts  as  they  appear  in  Peel's  correspondence. 
Still,  it  is  manifest  that  the  statesman  made  up  his 
mind  independently — a  circumstance  all  the  more 
complimentary  to  the  poet.  It  is  Hallam  who  refers 
to  Milnes;  it  is  not  Peel.  It  is  a  natural  inference 
indeed  that  the  latter  relied  little  upon  the  judgment 
of  his  colleague  as  compared  with  that  of  the  historian 
and  of  Eogers.  The  second  fact  which  is  brought  out 
distinctly  is  the  general  acknowledgment  which  had 
then  come  to  prevail  of  the  superiority  of  Tennyson 
to  all  the  poets  of  his  generation.  This  was  especially 
true  of  the  view  taken  by  the  younger  men ;  and  their 
opinion  would  necessarily  become  in  a  few  years  that 
of  the  whole  nation. 


TENNYSON'S  PENSION  513 

There  was  unquestionably  some  doubt  entertained, 
and  even  occasionally  expressed,  as  to  the  policy  of 
conferring  a  pension  upon  a  man  of  letters  who  was 
then  in  the  prime  of  life.  Still  the  same  objection 
would  have  applied  to  a  man  of  science  like  Professor 
Forbes  who  was  born  in  the  same  year  as  the  poet. 
Nevertheless,  a  feeling  of  this  sort  prevailed  even  in 
friendly  official  quarters.  Gladstone,  whom  Peel  con- 
sulted, observed  that  Tennyson  was  but  a  young  man 
for  a  pension.  '*As  to  his  genius,"  he  remarked,  '*I 
will  not  trouble  you  with  any  eulogy  of  mine,  but  will 
observe  that  Mr.  Eogers  told  me  he  considered  him 
by  much  the  first  among  all  the  younger  poets  of  this 
generation. ' '  Then  followed  an  expression  of  personal 
opinion  which  reveals  the  general  sentiment  existing 
at  that  time  that  little  pecuniary  return  could  be  hoped 
for  or  expected  by  him  who  gave  up  his  life  to  the 
cultivation  of  literature  pure  and  simple.  The  fore- 
boding entertained,  contrasted  with  the  subsequent 
fortunes  of  the  man  who  was  made  its  subject,  reads 
somewhat  strangely  now.  "Still  it  appears  estab- 
lished, ' '  concluded  Gladstone, ' '  that  though  a  true  and 
even  a  great  poet,  he  can  hardly  become  a  popular, 
and  is  much  more  likely  to  be  a  starving  one. ' ' 

There  was,  however,  nothing  peculiar  in  the  belief 
just  recorded.  Much  the  same  feeling  about  the  poet's 
worldly  success  in  the  calling  to  which  he  had  devoted 
himself  is  indicated  rather  than  expressed  in  an 
unpublished  letter  of  Rogers.  From  this  an  extract 
has  been  taken  by  one  of  Tennyson's  biographers. 
It  is  dated  October  20  of  this  same  year,  thus  following 


514  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

close  upon  the  gift  of  the  pension.  It  is  peculiarly- 
characteristic  of  the  writer,  who  was  wont  to  couple 
the  doing  of  generous  things  with  the  saying  of  ones 
frequently  far  from  being  entitled  to  that  epithet. 
'^ Tennyson,"  wrote  Rogers,  ''is  by  many  thought  unfit 
for  a  pension;  but  he  has  many  infirmities,  such  as 
to  you  I  hope  will  be  ever  unknown,  and  such  as  make 
him  utterly  incapable  of  supporting  himself.  Of  his 
genius  I  need  say  nothing,  and  have  only  to  wish  that 
I  could  always  understand  him.  "^  The  praise  given 
in  this  extract  can  hardly  be  called  unduly  enthu- 
siastic ;  but  it  distinctly  surpassed  the  gift  of  prophecy 
which  he  took  occasion  to  utter.  Eogers  lived  long 
enough  to  recognize  the  folly  of  his  prediction  of 
Tennyson's  incapacity  to  support  himself.  It  is  one 
of  the  misfortunes  of  old  age  that  it  is  constantly 
compelled  to  witness  the  failure  of  most  of  its 
prophetic  utterances,  in  particular  of  those  about 
contemporaries. 

However  satisfactory  the  gift  of  the  pension  was 
to  the  admirers  of  the  poet,  it  was  unquestionably  a 
subject  of  vexation  to  his  detractors.  Especially  was 
this  the  case  with  those  of  them  who  were  still  affected 
by  the  traditions  of  the  eighteenth  century.  Such 
persons  too  were  much  more  numerous  than  might 
have  been  supposed.  We  have  seen  that  the  praise 
given  by  the  leading  periodicals  had  never  gone  beyond 
the  limits  of  proper  critical  decorum.  We  cannot  tell 
in  any  given  case,  to  be  sure,  how  much  the  enthusiasm 

I'Lord  Tennyson,  a  Biographical  Sketch,'  by  Henry  J.  Jennings, 
1892,  p.  106. 


TENNYSON'S  PENSION  515 

of  the  writer  may  have  been  tempered  by  the  judicial 
discretion  of  the  editor;  for  those  were  the  days  in 
which  the  conductors  of  periodicals  assumed  the  right 
to  tamper  not  only  with  the  language  but  mth  the 
opinions  of  the  contributors,  even  those  most  noted, 
to  an  extent  which,  if  exercised  now,  would  tend  to 
sever  all  relations  between  the  two  parties.  In  the 
review,  for  instance,  which  Leigh  Hunt  wrote  of  the 
'Poems'  of  1842,  a  paragraph  containing  gross  per- 
sonal abuse  of  John  Mitchell  Kemble  was  inserted  by 
the  editor  without  the  writer's  knowledge  or  consent. 
Even  the  mild  praise  given  in  the  'Quarterly'  to 
Tennyson's  work  excited  the  indignation  of  some  of 
its  old  supporters.  It  was  hard  enough  for  Lockhart 
to  be  compelled  to  eat  his  own  words  by  admitting 
to  the  periodical  he  edited  an  article  which  contradicted 
in  numerous  ways  his  previous  utterances  on  the  same 
poet  and  the  same  poems.  Yet  he  had  to  undergo  the 
further  discomfort  of  being  censured  for  allowing  so 
much  praise  to  be  given  at  all.  ' '  I  may  permit  myself 
to  mention,"  he  wrote,  "that  Mr.  Croker  was  gravely 
offended  by  the  second  review  favourable  to  Tennyson, 
when  that  poet  came  forth  and  broke  silence  in  1842. '  '^ 
The  old  critical  guard  died  discredited  and  dis- 
regarded, it  is  true;  but  it  never  surrendered.  It 
never  pandered  to  the  depraved  taste  which  had 
turned  aside  from  the  old  gods  to  burn  incense  at  the 
shrines  which  had  been  set  up  by  the  worshippers  of 
the  new.  As  Croker  lived  until  1857,  he  had  ample 
time   and   constant   opportunity   to   grieve   over   the 

lA.  Lang's  'Lockhart,'  Vol.  II,  p.  287. 


516  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

degenerate  taste  which  had  come  to  reckon  Tennyson 
the  greatest  of  contemporary  poets. 

The  conferring  of  the  pension  led,  however,  to  one 
memorable  attack  which  came  near  furnishing  a 
prominent  chapter  in  the  quarrels  of  authors.  Such 
certainly  would  have  been  the  case  if  Tennyson's 
sensitiveness  to  criticism,  excessive  as  it  was,  had  not 
been  surpassed  by  his  self-restraint.  The  one  respon- 
sible for  the  attack  was  Bulwer,  who  on  his  mother's 
death  in  1843  had  assumed  the  surname  of  Lytton. 
Up  to  a  certain  date  the  fortunes  of  the  two  men  had 
not  been  dissimilar ;  in  truth,  they  may  be  said  to  have 
borne  at  the  beginning  a  somewhat  singular  resem- 
blance. Like  Tennyson,  Bulwer  had  begun  his  career 
as  a  poet.  Like  him  he  had  published  a  volume  when 
he  was  only  seventeen  years  old.  It  bore  on  the  title- 
page  that  it  was  written  between  the  ages  of  thirteen 
and  fifteen.  Like  him,  too,  he  had  gained  the  Chan- 
cellor's medal  at  Cambridge  for  a  prize  poem.  Here, 
however,  the  comparison  practically  ends.  Before  he 
had  taken  his  degree  in  1826,  Bulwer  had  published 
three  volumes  of  verse.  But  from  none  of  them  did 
he  gain  any  real  literary  repute.  That  came  to  him 
with  his  second  novel,  'Pelham,'  which  appeared  in 
1828,  and  which  made  dandyism  for  a  while  fashion- 
able. It  is  also  said,  whether  truly  or  untruly,  to  have 
introduced  the  fashion  of  wearing  black  coats  for 
evening  dress. 

It  was  upon  his  novels  mainly,  but  partly  upon  his 
parliamentary  labors  and  partly  upon  his  plays,  that 
Bulwer  built  up  his   reputation.     During  his  whole 


TENNYSON'S  PENSION  517 

career,  however,  he  had  occasional  lapses  into  verse. 
One  of  these  he  had  distinct  reason  to  regret.  It  was 
a  work  which  came  out  in  piecemeal.  Towards  the 
end  of  December,  1845,  appeared  the  first  part  of  a 
poem  entitled  'The  New  Timon.'  It  was  followed 
on  January  12,  1846,  by  Part  II,  and  on  February  4 
by  Part  III.  A  little  later  appeared  Part  IV,  which 
completed  the  work.  Though  the  volume  in  a  few 
years  passed  out  of  notice  and  has  now  largely  gone 
out  of  remembrance,  it  achieved  at  the  time  a  tem- 
porary popularity  or  at  least  notoriety,  both  in 
England  and  America.  Several  editions  of  it  were 
called  for  in  the  course  of  the  year.  Attention  had 
been  at  once  attracted  to  its  first  part  by  certain 
spirited  characterizations  it  contained  of  men  promi- 
nent in  public  life.  These  were  the  Duke  of  Wellington, 
Sir  Robert  Peel,  O'Connell,  and  Lord  Stanley,  the 
future  Earl  of  Derby.  To  this  last-named  a  phrase 
had  been  applied  by  Disraeli  in  a  speech  delivered  in 
the  House  of  Commons  in  April,  1844.  He  had  there 
styled  him  ''the  Rupert  of  debate."  This  description 
Bulwer  seized  upon  and  may  be  said  to  have  popular- 
ized. It  has  perhaps  done  more  to  keep  alive  the 
memory  of  the  poem  than  all  the  incidents  it  contained, 
or  the  scenes  it  depicted. 

'The  New  Timon'  was  anonymous.  It  professed 
indeed  to  be  written  by  an  Anglo-Indian.  In  a  note 
explaining  a  phrase  found  in  the  text  its  author  spoke 
of  it  as  "familiar  to  those  who,  like  the  writer,  have 
resided  in  the  vast  Empire  we  govern  and  forget." 
Indeed  great  care  seems  to  have  been  taken  at  the 


518  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

outset  to  guard  the  secret  of  the  authorship,  though 
attention  had  been  sedulously  called  to  the  work  long 
before  it  was  published,  by  copies  of  this  first  part 
having  been  sent  to  persons  prominent  in  social  and 
political  life.  Bulwer  himself  insisted  for  a  time  that 
he  had  nothing  whatever  to  do  with  its  composition. 
Even  to  his  intimate  friends  he  disclaimed  having 
written  it.  But  it  speedily  came  to  pass  that  hardly 
any  one,  whether  friendly  or  hostile,  went  to  the 
trouble  of  making  even  the  pretence  of  believing  his 
denial.  Those  connected  with  the  periodical  press 
who  affected  to  do  so,  did  it  for  the  sake  of  making 
more  bitter  their  personal  attack  upon  the  assumed 
unknown  author.  One  favorite  method  to  which  they 
resorted  was  to  point  out  the  resemblances  between 
the  scenes  and  incidents  in  'The  New  Timon'  and 
similar  scenes  and  incidents  in  Bulwer 's  novels.  This 
furnished  a  pretext  for  denouncing  the  plagiarisms 
of  the  anonymous  poet  from  the  works  of  the  prose 
writer  of  fiction.  There  was  indeed  no  use  in  Bulwer 's 
denying  the  authorship.  The  work  was  throughout 
in  his  manner.  It  had  his  tricks  of  expression,  even 
his  phrases,  and  followed  the  lines  of  development 
which  had  characterized  some  of  his  novels.  But  even 
with  the  poorest  of  these  it  could  not  compare.  As  a 
poem  it  was  a  very  ordinary  performance.  When 
stripped  of  the  adventitious  aid  of  its  personal  refer- 
ences, it  soon  sank  into  forgetfulness.  Bulwer  in  a 
short  time  came  to  recognize  the  uselessness  as  well 
as  the  folly  of  not  acknowledging  his  responsibility 
for  it.     His  poem  of  'King  Arthur,'  published  three 


TENNYSON'S  PENSION  519 

years  later,  not  only  bore  his  name  on  the  title-page, 
but  also  described  him  as  the  author  of  'The  New 
Timon. ' 

It  was  in  the  second  part  which  came  out  early  in 
1846  that  the  attack  on  Tennyson  appeared.  Without 
warning  and  without  conceivable  pretext  the  flow  of 
the  narrative  was  suddenly  interrupted  by  the  intro- 
duction of  a  paragraph  in  which  the  anonymous  author, 
while  celebrating  his  own  Spartan  severity  of  taste, 
expressed  his  lofty  disdain  of  the  meretricious  charms 
with  which  his  contemporary  had  sought  to  bedizen 
his  muse.  The  passage  began,  too,  with  the  same  old 
reference  to  that  mysterious  love  episode  of  his  early 
life  which  Bulwer  repeated  so  often  that  he  seems  to 
have  finally  come  to  believe  it  himself.  It  is  in 
the  following  lines  that  the  attack  on  Tennyson  is 
contained : 

Me  Life  had  skill  'd ! — to  me,  from  woe  and  wrong, 

By  Passion's  tomb  leapt  forth  the  source  of  Song. 

The  "Quicquid  agunt  Homines,^' — whate'er 

Our  actions  teach  us,  and  our  natures  share. 

Life  and  the  World,  our  City  and  our  Age, 

Have  tried  my  spirit  to  inform  my  page ; 

I  seek  no  purfled  prettiness  of  phrase, — 

A  soul  in  earnest  scorns  the  tricks  for  praise. 

If  to  my  verse  denied  the  Poet's  fame. 

This  merit,  rare  to  verse  that  wins,  I  claim ; 

No  tawdry  grace  shall  womanize  my  pen ! 

Ev  'n  in  a  love-song,  man  should  write  for  men ! 

Not  mine,  not  mine,  (0  Muse  forbid !)  the  boon 

Of  borrowed  notes,  the  mock-bird's  modish  tune, 

The  jingling  medley  of  purloin 'd  conceits, 

Outbabying  Wordsworth,  and  outglittering  Keates, 


520  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

Where  all  the  airs  of  patchwork-pastoral  chime 

To  drowsy  ears  in  Tennysonian  rhyme ! 

Am  I  enthrall'd  but  by  the  sterile  rule, 

The  formal  pupil  of  a  frigid  school, 

If  to  old  laws  my  Spartan  tastes  adhere, 

If  the  old  vigorous  music  charms  my  ear, 

"Where  sense  with  sound,  and  ease  with  weight  combine. 

In  the  pure  silver  of  Pope 's  ringing  line ; 

Or  where  the  pulse  of  man  beats  loud  and  strong 

In  the  frank  flow  of  Dryden's  lusty  song? 

Let  School-Miss  Alfred  vent  her  chaste  delight 

On  ''darling  little  rooms  so  warm  and  bright!" 

Chaunt  "I'm  aweary,"  in  infectious  strain. 

And  catch  her  ' '  blue  fly  singing  i '  the  pane. ' ' 

Tho'  praised  by  Critics,  tho'  adored  by  Blues, 

Tho'  Peel  with  pudding  plump  the  puling  Muse, 

Tho'  Theban  taste  the  Saxon's  purse  controuls. 

And  pensions  Tennyson,  while  starves  a  Knowles, 

Rather,  be  thou,  my  poor  Pierian  Maid, 

Decent  at  least,  in  Hayley's  weeds  array 'd. 

Than  patch  with  frippery  every  tinsel  line, 

And  flaunt,  admired,  the  Rag  Fair  of  the  Nine ! 

As  if  the  attack  in  the  lines  were  not  enough,  further 
comment  full  as  offensive  was  made  in  the  notes.  In 
them  Bulwer  reprinted  a  part  of  the  '0  Darling  Room' 
of  the  volume  of  1832,  which  Tennyson  had  silently 
dropped  from  his  new  edition.  ''The  whole  of  this 
Poem  (!!!),"  he  remarked,  "is  worth  reading,  in  order 
to  see  to  what  depth  of  silliness  the  human  intellect 
can  descend."  The  other  quotations  given  in  the 
attack  are  from  'Mariana.'  But  it  was  the  pension 
granted  to  Tennyson  that  stirred  most  Bulwer 's  bile. 
He   expressed   indignation   at   the   failure   of  James 


TENNYSON'S  PENSION  521 

Sheridan  Kjiowles  to  receive  one  and  the  preference 
that  had  been  given  to  Tennyson.  Of  the  poet  himself 
and  his  work,  Bulwer  expressed  no  uncertain  opinion. 
''The  most  that  can  be  said  of  Mr.  Tennyson,"  he 
wrote,  ''is,  that  he  is  the  favourite  of  a  small  circle; 
to  the  mass  of  the  Public  little  more  than  his  name 
is  kno^^^l — he  has  moved  no  thousands — he  has  created 
no  world  of  characters — he  has  laboured  out  no  death- 
less truths,  nor  enlarged  our  knowledge  of  the  human 
heart  by  the  delineation  of  various  and  elevating 
passions — he  has  lent  a  stout  shoulder  to  no  sinking 
but  manly  cause,  dear  to  the  Nation  and  to  Art;  yet, 
if  the  uncontradicted  statement  in  the  journals  be 
true,  this  Gentleman  has  been  quartered  on  the  public 
purse ;  he  is  in  the  prime  of  life,  belonging  to  a  wealthy 
family,  without,  I  believe,  wife  or  children;  at  the 
very  time  that  Mr.  Knowles  was  lecturing  for  bread 
in  foreign  lands,  verging  towards  old  age,  unfriended 
even  by  the  public  he  has  charmed! — such  is  the 
justice  of  our  Ministers,  such  the  national  gratitude 
to  those  whom  we  thank  and — starve." 

The  accuracy  of  the  information  contained  in  this 
note  as  to  Tennyson's  pecuniary  circumstances  was 
on  a  level  with  the  value  of  the  criticism  of  his  verse. 
Bulwer  was  a  man  of  distinct  and  varied  talents ;  but 
there  was  something  preposterous  in  an  author  of  his 
grade  of  poetical  achievement  venturing  to  assume  a 
superior  critical  attitude  towards  Wordsworth  and 
Keats,  to  say  nothing  of  the  unprovoked  attack  upon 
Tennvson.     He  was   speedily  to   learn  that  he  had 


522  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

utterly  mistaken  the  temper  of  the  times.  The  attitude 
of  the  public  towards  Tennyson  since  the  day  that 
Lockhart  could  safely  venture  to  publish  his  insolent 
review  of  1833  had  undergone  not  merely  alteration, 
but  a  complete  revolution.  This  every  one  saw  and 
felt  save  the  occasional  survivors  of  outworn  poetical 
creeds.  Bulwer's  verses  were  unquestionably  relished 
by  some  of  these  even  though  they  may  have  had 
no  special  admiration  for  the  poem  in  which  they 
appeared.  Hostile  criticism  of  Tennyson  had  come 
more  and  more  to  be  kept  in  restraint  with  the  progress 
of  time ;  but  the  disposition  to  depreciate  still  survived 
and  rejoiced  in  an  attack  it  did  not  itself  venture  to 
make.  Both  the  paragraph  in  the  poem  and  the  note 
accompanying  it  were  copied  with  hardly  disguised 
glee  in  '  The  Literary  Gazette '  in  its  review  of  Part  II 
of  *The  New  Timon.'  There  was  at  least  one  exhibi- 
tion of  the  same  state  of  mind  in  America.  Here 
Bulwer  's  work  was  republished  from  the  third  edition. 
It  was  highly  praised  in  an  article  written  by  Bartol, 
then  a  prominent  Unitarian  clergyman  of  Boston. 
This  is  worth  noticing,  not  for  its  critical  acumen  which 
was  less  than  nothing,  but  for  the  sympathy  manifested 
with  the  attack  made  upon  the  poet.  It  occurs  in  a 
review  of  several  volumes  of  verse,  in  which  'The 
New  Timon'  was  singled  out  from  the  rest  for  especial 
laudation.  It  was  characterized  as  ''the  most  fresh 
and  striking  work  of  late  English  publication ;  and  its 
strong  style  is  a  wholesome  protest  against  the  feeble 
sentimentality  and   slender  ornaments   of  the  whole 


TENNYSON'S  PENSION  523 

Tennyson  school. ' "  The  poem  received  also  high  and 
really  undeserved  praise  in  a  review  of  it  by  Lowell, 
though  he  censured  the  attack  made  in  it  on  Words- 
worth and  Keats  and  Tennyson.- 

But  criticisms  of  this  nature  were  far  from  repre- 
senting the  general  attitude.  Bulwer  had  unwittingly 
stirred  up  a  hornet's  nest.  He  speedily  discovered 
that  the  circle  of  which  Tennyson  was  a  favorite  was 
far  from  being  the  small  one  he  had  supposed.  It 
must  indeed  have  given  him  something  of  a  shock  to 
discover  that  the  opinion  expressed  in  his  verses  was 
so  far  from  finding  sympathizers  that,  outside  of  a 
very  limited  circle,  it  could  hardly  muster  even  apolo- 
gists. A  host  of  partisans  at  once  rushed  forward 
not  merely  to  defend  the  assailed  but  to  attack  the 
assailant.  The  contemptuous  tone  often  taken  in  the 
periodicals  which  reviewed  'The  New  Timon'  on  its 
completion  was  largely  intensified  by  the  resentment 
felt  for  his  sneers  at  Tennyson  and  the  futile  efforts 
of  the  writer  to  escape  responsibility  for  the  author- 
ship of  the  poem  in  which  they  were  contained.  In 
truth,  the  storm  eventually  became  too  violent  to  be 
endured.  The  scornful  attitude  which  Bulwer  had 
assumed  towards  the  poet  had  been  returned  upon 
him  with  unexpected  intensity.  The  second  edition 
of  the  complete  work  appeared  about  the  middle  of 
March.  Shortly  after  came  out  the  third  edition. 
Later  in  the  year  appeared  a  fourth  edition.     From 

1  Article  on  'Poetry  and  Imagination,'  by  the  Eev.  Cyrus  Augustus 
Bartol  in  '  The  Christian  Examiner, '  Vol.  VII,  4th  series,  p.  263. 

2  '  North  American  Eeview, '  Vol.  LXIV,  p.  467. 


524  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

that  the  offensive  paragraph  in  the  poem  and  its 
accompanying  notes  were  silently  withdrawn  and  have 
never  since  been  reprinted. 

The  incident  itself  brought  to  the  attention  of  all 
at  the  time  as  well  as  to  Bulwer  himself  the  change 
which  had  come  over  the  minds  of  men  since  Lockhart 
had  published  his  review  of  1833.  Not  unfrequent 
comment  was  made  upon  the  fact.  ' '  Of  the  hold  which 
his  poetry  has  already  taken  on  the  public  heart," 
wrote  "William  Howitt,  for  example,  in  1846,  ''a  strik- 
ing instance  was  lately  given.  The  anonymous  author 
of  The  New  Timon  stepped  out  of  his  way  and  his 
subject  to  represent  Tennyson's  muse  as  a  puling 
school-miss.  The  universal  outburst  of  indignation 
from  the  press  scared  the  opprobrious  lines  speedily 
out  of  the  snarler  's  pages.  A  new  edition  was  quickly 
announced,  from  which  they  had  wisely  vanished." 
With  the  eventual  disappearance  of  all  interest  in  the 
work  itself  both  these  lines  in  it  and  the  notes  accom- 
panying them  were  soon  forgotten.  In  process  of 
time,  too,  Tennyson  came  to  have  amicable  relations 
with  his  assailant,  at  least  outwardly  amicable  ones ; 
for  it  is  hard  to  believe  that  there  could  have  been 
any  genuine  sympathy  of  feeling  between  two  men 
so  utterly  dissimilar  in  character  and  motive.  Still 
he  prefixed  to  his  drama  of  *  Harold, '  published  in  1876, 
a  dedication  to  the  second  Lord  Lytton.  In  the  course 
of  it  he  observed  that  the  historical  romance  of  the 
first  lord  had  been  one  of  his  main  helps  in  writing 
his  own  work.    "Your  father,"  he  concluded,  ''dedi- 


TENNYSON'S  PENSION  525 

cated  his  'Harold'  to  my  father's  brother;  allow  me 
to  dedicate  my  Harold  to  yourself." 

In  the  temporary  tempest  which  arose,  the  sym- 
pathies of  the  men  of  the  younger  generation  in 
particular,  were,  as  might  be  supposed,  almost  entirely 
on  the  side  of  Tennyson,  Among  these  were  the 
writers  concerned  in  the  publication  of  *  Punch,'  which 
had  begun  its  existence  five  years  before.  The 
periodical  came  in  consequence  to  take  a  somewhat 
memorable  part  in  the  controversy  which  sprang  up. 
In  the  number  for  February  7,  1846,  appeared  the 
follomng  little  squib  entitled  '  ''The  New  Timon"  and 
Alfred  Tennyson 's  Pension ' : 

You've  seen  a  lordly  mastiff's  port, 
Bearing  in  calm  contemptuous  sort 
The  snarls  of  some  o'erpetted  pup, 
Who  grudges  him  his  ' '  bit  and  sup ' ' : 
So  stands  the  bard  of  Locksley  Hall 
While  puny  darts  around  him  fall, 
Tipp'd  with  what  Timon  takes  for  venom; 
He  is  the  mastiff,  Tim  the  Blenheim. 

The  satire  of  these  lines  was  poorer  than  anything  to 
be  found  in  Bulwer's  poem.  It  indicated  the  resent- 
ment that  prevailed,  but  was  far  from  giving  it 
adequate  expression.  But  its  feebleness  was  more 
than  made  up  by  Tennyson  himself  in  a  poem  which 
appeared  in  the  number  for  February  28  of  this  same 
periodical.  It  bore  the  title  of  'The  New  Timon,  and 
the  Poets,'  and  had  appended  to  it  the  signature  of 
Alcibiades.  Though  the  authorship  of  the  poem  was 
veiled,  no  one  who  had  become  familiar  with  Tenny- 


526  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

son's  style  could  fail  to  detect  the  writer  who  was 
responsible  for  the  following  lines: 

"We  knew  him,  out  of  Shakespeare's  art, 
And  those  fine  curses  which  he  spoke; 

The  old  Timon,  with  his  noble  heart, 

That,  strongly  loathing,  greatly  broke. 

So  died  the  Old :  here  comes  the  New. 

Regard  him :  a  familiar  face : 
I  thought  we  knew  him:    What,  it's  you. 

The  padded  man  —  that  wears  the  stays — 

Who  kill'd  the  girls  and  thrill 'd  the  boys. 
With  dandy  pathos  when  you  wrote, 

A  Lion,  you,  that  made  a  noise, 

And  shook  a  mane  en  papillotes. 

And  once  you  tried  the  Muses  too ; 

You  fail  'd.  Sir :  therefore  now  you  turn, 
To  fall  on  those  who  are  to  you. 

As  Captain  is  to  Subaltern. 

But  men  of  long-enduring  hopes, 

And  careless  what  this  hour  may  bring, 

Can  pardon  little  would-be  Popes 

And  Brummels,  when  they  try  to  sting. 

An  artist,  Sir,  should  rest  in  Art, 

And  waive  a  little  of  his  claim ; 
To  have  the  deep  Poetic  heart 

Is  more  than  all  poetic  fame. 

But  you,  Sir,  you  are  hard  to  please ; 

You  never  look  but  half  content : 
Nor  like  a  gentleman  at  ease, 

With  moral  breadth  of  temperament. 


TENNYSON'S  PENSION  527 

And  what  with  spites  and  what  ^vith  fears, 

You  canuot  let  a  body  be : 
It's  always  ringing  in  your  ears, 

"They  call  this  man  as  good  as  me." 

What  profits  now  to  understand 

The  merits  of  a  spotless  shirt — 
A  dapper  boot — a  little  hand — 

If  half  the  little  soul  is  dirt? 

You  talk  of  tinsel !  why,  we  see 

The  old  mark  of  rouge  upon  your  cheeks. 

You  prate  of  Nature !  you  are  he 

That  spilt  his  life  about  the  cliques. 

A  Timon  you !    Nay,  nay,  for  shame : 

It  looks  too  arrogant  a  jest — 
The  fierce  old  man — to  take  his  name, 

You  bandbox.    Off,  and  let  him  rest. 

The  full  force  of  Tennyson's  satire  will  never  be 
appreciated  save  by  the  few;  for  it  is  the  few  only 
who  will  have  either  the  leisure  or  the  courage  to  wade 
through  the  work  which  suggested  it.  The  poet  him- 
self never  republished  the  piece.  It  is  not  to  be  found 
in  any  authorized  edition  of  his  writings ;  which  is  one 
main  reason  for  reprinting  it  here.  He  further  dis- 
claimed all  responsibility  for  its  publication  at  the 
time.  ''I  never  sent  my  lines  to  Punch,^^  he  wrote. 
"John  Forster  did.  They  were  too  bitter.  I  do  not 
think  that  I  should  ever  have  published  them. ' '  How- 
ever they  got  there,  it  is  manifest  that  Tennyson 
speedily  regretted  the  printing  of  them,  perhaps  the 
writing  of  them.     In  the  next  number   of   'Punch' 


528  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

indeed  appeared  a  short  piece  of  liis  which  expressed 
his  real  sentiments  after  he  had  recovered  from  his 
temporary  indignation.  It  bore  the  same  signature 
of  Alcibiades  and  was  entitled  'Afterthoughts.'  In 
modern  editions  of  the  poet  it  is  found  under  the 
heading  of  '  Literary  Squabbles. '  In  this  he  appeared 
to  express  a  sense  of  shame  for  having  been  betrayed 
into  taking  notice  of  the  unprovoked  attack  to  which 
he  had  been  subjected.  Such  undoubtedly  were  the 
feelings  he  had  himself  soon  come  to  entertain;  but 
to  the  reader  he  will  seem  to  have  followed  the  wisest 
and  properest  course  to  vindicate  his  own  reputation 
and  to  protect  himself  from  future  assaults  of  a  similar 
character.  The  trenchant  lines  he  then  wrote  were 
unquestionably  a  main  if  not  the  main  agency  in 
causing  the  suppression  of  the  offensive  passages 
about  himself ;  and  it  announced  in  unmistakable  terms 
to  the  whole  tribe  of  depredators  that  it  would  not 
be  satisfactory  to  their  present  peace  of  mind  or  to 
their  future  reputation  to  presume  too  far  upon  the 
patience  of  School-miss  Alfred.  To  be  safe  from 
contempt,  they  must  either  be  careful  to  hide  their 
names  or  wait  till  the  object  of  their  attack  was  dead. 
Whatever  may  have  been  the  nature  of  the  recon- 
ciliation between  the  two  men,  it  is  plain  that  Bulwer's 
real  feelings  at  this  particular  period  of  his  life  were 
revealed  in  the  lines  he  was  forced  to  discard.  In  a 
later  novel  he  put  the  views  he  still  cherished  in  the 
mouth  of  one  of  his  favorite  characters.  In  it  Colonel 
Morley  is  represented  as  cursing  the  critics  for  having 
praised  the  verses  of  a  certain  imaginary  poet  who 


TENNYSON'S  PENSION  529 

was  dead.  His  words  really  express  Bulwer's  poetic 
creed,  and  the  faith  he  accepted  did  not  include  Tenny- 
son. The  work  of  this  assumed  dead  author,  Colonel 
Morley  declared  he  had  failed  to  read,  not  because  it 
was  below  contempt,  but  because  it  was  above  compre- 
hension. ''All  poetry,"  says  he,  ''praised  by  critics 
nowadays  is  as  hard  to  understand  as  a  hieroglyphic. 
I  o^\^l  a  weakness  for  Pope  and  common  sense.  I 
could  keep  up  vdth  our  age  as  far  as  Byron ;  but  after 
him  I  was  throwTi  out.  However,  Arthur  was  declared 
by  the  critics  to  be  a  great  improvement  on  Byron ! — 
more  'poetical  in  form' — more  'aesthetically  artistic' — 
more  'objective'  or  'subjective'  (I  am  sure  I  forget 
which,  but  it  was  one  or  the  other,  nonsensical,  and 
not  English)  in  his  views  of  man  and  nature.  Very 
possibly.  All  I  know  is — I  bought  the  poems,  but  could 
not  read  them ;  the  critics  read  them,  but  did  not  buy. '  '^ 
This  was  far  from  an  exact  representation  of  the  sale 
of  Tennyson's  writings,  but  it  was  of  Bulwer's  feel- 
ings at  the  time  about  his  great  contemporary.  This 
attitude  he  continued  to  hold  long  after  and  perhaps 
never  abandoned.  To  a  visitor  at  Knebsworth  in  1861, 
he  said  that  he  could  not  read  Tennyson. 

I'What  Will  He  Do  with  It/  1859,  Vol.  Ill,  p.  133. 


CHAPTER  XX 
THE  PRINCESS 

On  the  seventeenth  of  December,  1847,  London  daily- 
papers  announced  in  their  advertising  columns  the 
appearance  '4n  a  few  days"  of  a  new  poem  by  Tenny- 
son entitled  'The  Princess.'  On  Saturday,  the  twenty- 
fifth  of  the  same  month,  came  the  further  announce- 
ment that  it  was  that  day  published.  The  work  had 
been  for  some  time  in  preparation.  In  May,  1845, 
FitzGerald  had  met  Tennyson  in  London.  "He  was 
looking  well  and  in  good  spirits, ' '  he  wrote  to  Frederick 
Tennyson,  "and  had  got  two  hundred  lines  of  a  new 
poem  in  a  butcher 's  book. '  '^  This  is  one  of  the  earlier 
notices  of  the  poet's  being  actually  engaged  on  the 
work  he  was  contemplating. 

The  estimate  which  had  now  come  to  be  taken  of 
Tennyson  by  the  educated  class,  and  the  interest  with 
which  anything  from  his  pen  was  looked  for,  are 
evinced  by  the  fact  that  talk  about  the  expected  poem 
began  in  literary  circles  almost  as  soon  as  it  was  kno^vn 
to  be  in  course  of  preparation.  The  reports  which 
sprang  up  in  regard  to  it  and  continued  even  to  the 
date  of  its  publication  bore  generally  only  a  remote 
resemblance  to  the  truth.    A  peculiarly  fantastic  one, 

1  Letter  of  June  12,  1845,  in  FitzGerald 's  'Letters  and  Literary 
Eemains,'  Vol.  I,  p.  154. 


THE  PRINCESS  531 

learned  from  her  brother,  was  communicated  to  her 
future  husband  by  Miss  Barrett  nearly  two  years 
before  the  work  appeared.  At  the  very  end  of 
January,  1846,  she  wrote  to  Bro^vning  that  Tennyson 
was  seriously  ill  with  an  internal  complaint  and  con- 
fined to  his  bed,  as  George  hears  from  a  common 
friend.  ''Which,"  she  added,  "does  not  prevent  his 
writing  a  new  poem — he  has  finished  the  second  book 
of  it — and  it  is  in  blank  verse  and  a  fairy  tale,  and  is 
called  the  'University,'  the  university-members  being 
all  females."  Miss  Barrett  was  as  much  puzzled  by 
the  character  of  this  news  as  Tennyson  would  have 
been  himself.  "I  don't  know  what  to  think — ,"  she 
added;  "it  makes  me  open  my  eyes." 

Rumors,  indeed,  many  fanciful  and  some  almost 
grotesque,  about  the  nature  of  the  work  and  the  senti- 
ments expressed  in  it  were  prevalent  during  the  years 
immediately  preceding  its  appearance.  Taking  into 
consideration  its  actual  character,  perhaps  the  most 
extraordinary  was  that  it  was  marked  by  peculiar 
hostility  to  the  female  sex.  Mary  Russell  Mitford 
more  than  once  in  her  correspondence  bears  witness 
to  the  existence  of  this  impression.  In  September  of 
1847,  she  wrote  that  she  had  heard  of  its  being  very 
beautiful,  but  that  it  gave  a  low  idea  of  women.  She 
had  previously  informed  a  correspondent  that  Dyce, 
whom  she  described  as  "a  man  of  consummate  taste," 
had  reported  the  same  view  in  almost  the  same  words. 
The  Dyce  here  mentioned  was  doubtless  the  Shake- 
spearean editor.  It  is  a  natural  inference  from  her 
remark  that  he  had  seen  the  work,  but  it  is  probably 


532  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

an  erroneous  one;  for  Ms  description  of  it  precludes 
the  idea  of  his  possessing  any  real  knowledge  of  its 
character.  This  is  but  one  of  several  mistaken  views 
of  it  which  were  pronounced  with  great  positiveness 
before  it  came  out  to  confound  the  utterers.  A  letter 
from  the  younger  Hallam  gives  an  account  of  a  visitor 
in  December,  1847, — just  on  the  eve  of  publication — 
undertaking  to  characterize  the  poem,  ''his  fixed  idea 
being  that  it  was  tremendously  comic  and  that  the 
merit  turned  on  the  quaint  conceits  of  the  plot."  It 
was  certainly  fortunate  for  Tennyson  that  he  never 
attempted  to  make  the  reality  in  any  way  correspond 
to  this  description.  He  had  in  certain  ways  a  keen 
sense  of  humor,  and  was  often  happy  in  expressing  it. 
He  could  produce  characterizations  which  entertain 
us  by  their  quaintness  as  well  as  by  their  accuracy 
of  representation.  He  further  enjoyed  the  purely 
comic ;  but  it  was  as  impossible  for  him  to  write  it  as 
it  was  for  Milton.  In  all  his  humor  there  is  a  certain 
high  seriousness.  Behind  its  manifestations  there  is 
fairly  sure  to  be  a  grim  background.  But  when  he 
comes  to  the  lighter  forms  of  badinage  or  persiflage, 
he  is  never  at  home.  If  any  serious  fault  is  to  be  laid 
to  the  charge  of  'The  Princess,'  it  is  to  be  found  in 
one  or  two  places  where  he  seems  to  be  aiming  after 
a  fashion  at  that  effect. 

The  work  underwent  a  good  deal  of  revision 
and  alteration  during  the  years  which  immediately 
followed  its  publication.  Besides  changes  in  the  text 
of  individual  lines,  these  consisted  to  a  slight  extent 
of  omissions  but  mainly  of  additions.     The   second 


THE  PRINCESS  533 

edition  indeed,  which  came  out  in  September,  1848, 
varied  hardly  at  all  from  the  first.  The  principal 
difference  between  the  two  consisted  of  the  now  pre- 
fixed dedication  of  the  poem  to  Henry  Lushington, 
who  was  not  merely  a  close  personal  friend  but  one 
of  the  most  trusted  of  Tennyson's  literary  advisers. 
But  in  the  third  edition  which  appeared  at  the  begin- 
ning of  February,  1850,  numerous  changes  were  made. 
To  some  extent  they  took  the  form  of  revision,  but 
mainly  of  additions.  These  latter  necessarily  involved 
more  or  less  of  alteration,  usually  very  slight,  in  the 
pre\^ously  accepted  text.  The  six  intercalary  songs 
were  introduced.  They  had  been  in  the  poet's  mind 
from  the  outset,  but  he  had  decided  not  to  include 
them,  because  while  deeming  them  the  best  interpreters 
of  the  poem,  he  had  come  to  the  conclusion  that  the 
work  would  explain  itself.  When  he  discovered  that 
the  public  did  not  see  his  drift,  which  was  to  make  the 
babe  the  central  figure,  he  changed  his  mind.  Altera- 
tions were  also  made  in  the  body  of  the  work  as  well 
as  in  the  prologue  and  conclusion.  Furthermore,  there 
was  then  added  the  interlude  which  follows  Part  IV. 
Up  to  the  appearance  of  the  third  edition,  the  whole 
poem  had  been  in  blank  verse.  Even  the  three  songs 
which  from  the  first  it  had  contained  were  unrhjTiied. 
The  introduction  of  these  six  intercalary  lyrics  in  this 
edition  was  its  most  important  feature  so  far  as  its 
effect  upon  the  public  was  concerned.  It  gave  the  poem 
an  attraction  to  many  who  had  pre\iously  been  dis- 
posed to  look  upon  it  ^^^th  indifference  or  had  been 
led  by  foolish  criticism  to  speak  of  it  ^\dth  disparage- 


534  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

ment.  For  this  result  there  was  ample  reason. 
Effective  as  Tennyson  was  in  blank  verse — never  more 
so  than  in  'The  Princess' — it  was  his  lyric  gift  that 
above  everything  else  made  him  the  favorite  of  the 
public  which  he  became.  Few  are  the  men  who  have 
the  leisure,  even  if  they  have  the  desire  to  familiarize 
themselves  with  even  the  greatest  of  long  poems; 
fewer  still  have  the  mental  equipment  to  recognize  the 
consummate  perfection  of  treatment  in  which  part 
is  made  to  answer  to  part,  the  skill  with  which  the 
incidents  are  marshalled  so  as  to  lead  inevitably  to 
their  destined  conclusion.  All  this  implies  not  only 
high  cultivation  but  takes  time  and  thought.  Conse- 
quently such  works  can  become  favorites  of  but  a 
limited  number.  But  a  lyric  appeals  to  all.  Its 
sentiment  will  be  felt  by  the  humblest  who  is  perhaps 
unable  to  appreciate  the  exquisite  delicacy  of  work- 
manship wliich  impresses  itself  upon  the  intellectually 
highest.  In  consequence  these  six  intercalary  lyrics 
were  at  once  circulated  far  and  wide.  As  naturally 
they  were  made  the  subject  of  constant  comment  and 
critical  judgment.  A  collection  of  the  various  and 
varying  estimates  put  by  different  readers  on  their 
respective  merits  would  be  one  of  the  curiosities  of 
criticism,  if  any  particular  criticism,  no  matter  what 
its  character,  is  entitled  to  be  called  curious.  Each 
of  these  lyrics  had  its  partisans.  The  general  voice 
apparently  favored  the  bugle  song  which  had  been 
suggested  by  the  echoes  heard  by  Tennyson  on  Lake 
Killarney.  To  many  what  seemed  the  most  effective 
of  them  all  was  the  one  beginning  ''Ask  me  no  more," 


THE  PRINCESS  535 

indicating  the  final  surrender  of  the  Princess  to  the 
feelings  against  which  she  had  been  struggling. 

The  fourth  edition  which  followed  in  April,  1851, 
was  distinguished  by  the  regrettable  addition  of  the 
''weird  seizures"  to  which  the  Prince  is  represented 
as  being  subject.  Various  changes  were  in  consequence 
rendered  necessary.  The  conclusion,  furthermore,  was 
largely  rewritten.  The  little  more  than  half-dozen 
lines  of  the  original  opening  were  extended  to  thirty- 
two.  Further  on,  forty  lines  were  introduced,  occa- 
sioned by  the  events  which  had  followed  the  continental 
revolution  of  1848.  There  was  the  usual  complacent 
comparison  between  the  sobriety  and  law-abiding 
character  of  the  English  as  contrasted  with  the  levity 
of  the  French.  Then  followed  the  fifth  edition  which 
was  brought  out  towards  the  middle  of  February, 
1853.  In  it  are  found  a  number  of  minor  changes; 
but  the  only  important  addition  was  the  fourteen 
stirring  lines  of  the  prologue  beginning  with  the  words 
' '  0  miracle  of  women. ' '  This  edition  presents  us  the 
poem  in  its  final  definitive  form.  Very  few  and  of  very 
slight  importance  were  the  changes  subsequently  made. 
In  consequence  of  the  alterations  and  additions  which 
it  had  received,  the  nearly  three  thousand  lines  of 
which  it  had  originally  consisted  had  been  extended  to 
over  thirty-three  hundred  in  spite  of  the  omission  of 
some  twenty  or  thirty  which  had  been  thrown  out  in 
the  recast  made  of  the  work.  Furthermore,  not  only 
had  about  three  hundred  and  fifty  lines  been  added  but 
there  had  been  a  modification  of  the  language,  espe- 
cially in  the  prologue  and  the  epilogue,  in  the  always 


536  LIFE  AND  TBIES  OF  TENNYSON 

hopeless  attempt  to  meet  the  objections  of  miintelligent 
criticism. 

So  much  for  the  bibliographical  details  of  the  work. 
Now  comes  the  consideration  of  its  history  and  char- 
acter. The  subject  had  been  in  Tennyson's  mind  long 
before  he  undertook  the  composition  of  the  poem ;  for 
it  was  not  until  about  1845  that  he  set  seriously  about 
the  task  of  preparation.  As  early  as  1839,  he  had 
talked  over  the  plan  of  the  work  with  her  who  was 
later  to  become  his  wife.  Upon  the  part  woman  ought 
to  play  in  life  he  had  very  definite  opinions.  In  this 
as  in  many  other  of  his  speculations  he  was  as  much 
in  advance  of  his  age  as  to  some  of  those  whose  cause 
he  then  championed  he  would  possibly  seem  behind 
now.  There  is  nothing  in  the  work,  however,  to  indi- 
cate what  was  his  position  on  the  subjects  of  contro- 
versy to  which  public  attention  is  at  present  more 
specifically  directed.  But  to  him  the  higher  education 
of  woman  was  a  social  question  transcending  in 
importance  the  great  political  ones  which  at  that  time 
occupied  the  thoughts  and  inflamed  the  passions  of 
his  countrymen.  That  any  mode  of  education  or  non- 
education  that  tended  to  restrict  her  intellectual 
powers  would  not  only  work  harm  to  her  but  to  man 
also  was  his  firm  faith.  Naturally  he  sympathized 
with  every  effort  put  forth  to  increase  the  facilities 
for  her  fullest  development. 

In  certain  ways  the  adequate  treatment  of  the 
subject  presented  peculiar  difficulties ;  especially  so  at 
that  time.    It  had  its  serious  side  in  the  actual  wrongs 


THE  PRINCESS  537 

which  woman  had  endured  in  the  past  and  was  con- 
tinuing to  endure  in  the  present.  There  was  a  further 
grievance  in  the  obstacles  which  were  encountered  in 
every  effort  to  remedy  these  wrongs.  Upon  all 
measures  in  this  direction  contumely  had  been  regu- 
larly poured  by  hard-headed  men  who  were  in  general 
difficult  to  con\'ince  because  they  w^ere  at  the  same 
time  usually  thick-headed.  Nothing  but  abuse  had 
waited  upon  the  arguments  of  Mary  Wollstonecraft 
in  what  to  modern  ears  seems  her  peculiarly  temperate 
statements  of  the  right  of  her  sex  to  an  inde- 
pendent career  and  activity.  On  the  other  hand, 
loud  applause  was  given  even  by  women  themselves 
to  the  sentimental  slipslop  of  various  pious  advisers 
like,  for  instance,  the  Eeverend  Dr.  Fordyce,  who 
in  his  'Sermons  to  Young  Women,'  assured  them 
that  **men  of  sensibility  desire  in  every  woman  soft 
features,  a  flowing  voice,  a  form  not  robust,  and  a 
demeanour  delicate  and  gentle. ' '  Far  more  endurable 
to  women  of  sense  than  this  senile  maundering 
about  her  proper  attitude  and  character  is  the  brutal 
proclamation  of  her  essential  inferiority  and  heaven- 
ordained  subjection  to  man  which  on  more  than  one 
occasion  Milton  put  forth;  never  more  energetically 
than  in  the  words  he  jolaces  in  Eve's  mouth  at  the 
beginning  of  one  of  the  most  beautiful  passages  in 
'Paradise  Lost.'  It  is  in  this  way — sufficient  of  itself 
to  account  largely  for  the  unhappiness  of  Milton's 
first  marriage — that  our  first  mother  is  represented 
as  addressing  Adam : 


538  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

My  author  and  disposer,  what  thou  bidd'st 
Unargued  I  obey.     So  God  ordains: 
God  is  thy  law,  thou  mine ;  to  know  no  more 
Is  woman's  happiest  knowledge  and  her  praise. 

These  words  unquestionably  represent  Milton's  atti- 
tude upon  the  relation  of  the  sexes.  It  is  perhaps 
needless  to  add  that  he  who  sets  out  to  act  upon  such 
a  view  will  ordinarily  have  in  no  very  long  time  the 
consideration  of  the  subject  of  divorce  pressed  upon 
his  attention,  even  if  he  does  not  write  treatises  upon 
it. 

Naturally  any  self-respecting  woman  would  feel  out- 
raged at  two  such  representations  of  her  position  and 
aims  as  those  just  taken  from  Fordyce  and  Milton. 
She  would  be  more  than  justified  in  protesting  vio- 
lently against  indignities  of  this  sort  placed  upon  her 
sex.  With  these  feelings,  every  intelligent  man  could 
sympathize.  Unfortunately  opposed  to  the  serious 
side  of  the  subject,  there  was  a  ludicrous  one;  at  least 
to  the  great  majority  of  the  public  it  seemed  ludicrous. 
This  was  caused  by  the  hysterical  passion  with  which 
movements  for  the  elevation  of  woman  had  been 
attended,  and  the  extravagant  views  and  expectations 
of  what  not  merely  could  but  certainly  would  be  accom- 
plished as  a  result  of  her  sharing  every  privilege 
possessed  by  man.  Hence  in  order  to  get  a  hearing 
for  his  own  ideas,  Tennyson  saw  that  it  was  necessary 
to  take  into  account  these  two  conflicting  currents  of 
thought  and  feeling.  To  effect  this  purpose  he  made 
the  work,  what  he  called  it,  a  medley.  The  narrator 
is   represented   as    saying   that   to    relate   the    story 


THE  PRINCESS  539 

properly  it  would  be  necessary  to  call  back  him  who 
had  told  'The  Winter's  Tale';  who  had  mingled  in  one 
artistic  whole  the  past  and  the  present,  Christian  belief 
and  heathen  practice ;  who  had  brought  into  the  same 
period  of  time  Puritans  singing  psalms  to  horn  pipes 
and  messengers  dispatched  to  consult  the  oracle  of 
Apollo;  who  had  given  to  Bohemia  a  seacoast  and 
had  placed  Delphos  on  an  island;  who  had  made  his 
first  heroine  queen  of  the  Sicilia  of  classic  times  but 
likewise  the  daughter  of  the  emperor  of  Eussia; 
and  who  in  this  remote  pagan  past  had  introduced 
sculptures  which  surpassed  the  work  of  the  most  noted 
of  Raphael's  disciples. 

All  these  diverse  and  conflicting  elements  Shake- 
speare had  wrought  into  a  whole  so  harmonious  that 
only  the  unhappy  pedant  is  disturbed  by  their  appear- 
ance. Tennyson  had  determined  to  follow  Ms  example. 
If  he  could  not  do  as  well  as  the  great  master,  he 
would  do  as  well  as  he  could.  The  whole  scheme  of 
his  poem  contemplated  therefore  the  jumbling  together 
of  the  past  and  the  present.  Not  merely  was  it  inti- 
mated, it  was  directly  asserted,  that  there  was  to  be 
confusion;  that  the  manners  of  different  periods  were 
to  be  brought  together ;  that  into  the  modes  of  thinking, 
into  the  moods  of  feeling,  into  the  activities  of  the 
existing  everyday  world  were  to  be  thrust  the  modes, 
the  moods,  the  activities  of  an  outworn  age.  Fullest 
notice  of  this  intention  was  given.  It  was  implied  in 
the  very  wording  of  the  sub-title.  For  any  help 
afforded  by  it  in  conveying  the  knowledge  of  it  to  the 
mind  of  the  average  critic,  it  might  as  Avell  have  been 


540  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

left  unwritten.  Never  was  greater  reluctance  to  accept 
a  work  as  the  author  designed  it  more  pronounced  and 
more  violently  proclaimed  than  in  the  sort  of  welcome 
with  which  'The  Princess'  was  greeted  at  its  first 
appearance.  Stupid  as  well  as  malignant  criticism 
fell  to  Tennyson's  lot  during  the  whole  of  his  career. 
That  is  the  fate  which  befalls  all  great  poets. 
But  there  was  a  peculiar  obtuseness  of  perception 
in  the  immediate  contemporary  notices  of  the  work 
in  question  that  exceeded  the  justifiable  inability  to 
appreciate  which  we  accord  to  the  extremest  form  of 
critical  inanity. 

If  Tennyson  had  expected  to  secure  himself  from 
attack  by  proclaiming  his  poem  to  be,  what  it  was,  a 
medley,  he  evinced  little  knowledge  of  the  methods 
followed  by  no  small  number  of  the  reviewing  frater- 
nity. There  are  men  who  can  never  be  satisfied  with 
letting  a  great  artist  do  his  work  in  his  own  way.  He 
must  do  it  in  accordance  with  some  theory  of  their 
own  of  what  it  ought  to  be  and  how  it  ought  to  be 
done.  In  the  opinion  of  these  men,  persons  with  the 
views  the  characters  in  this  poem  are  represented  as 
holding  were  under  obligation  to  conduct  themselves 
in  exact  consonance  with  the  proprieties  observed  in 
modern  life.  As  according  to  the  framework  of  the 
poem,  they  manifestly  could  not  do  it,  as  they  certainly 
did  not  do  it,  the  feelings  of  these  sticklers  for  con- 
ventional manners  were  distinctly  outraged.  They 
objected  stoutly  to  Tennyson's  course  in  creating  a 
world  whose  dwellers  did  not  act  in  conformity  to  the 
rules  of  etiquette  which  prevailed  in  the  society  of  the 


THE  PRINCESS  541 

nineteenth  century.  From  the  purely  literary  point 
of  view  they  were  shocked  at  his  temerity  in  making 
the  work  a  medley.  This  attitude  was  particularly 
noticeable  in  the  reviews  which  appeared  in  the 
literary  weeklies.  These  were  naturally  the  first 
in  the  field.  With  only  one  exception  among  the 
more  important  of  these  periodicals — the  article  by 
John  Forster  in  'The  Examiner' — their  verdict  was 
distinctly  unfavorable  as  a  whole.  In  general,  it 
ranged  all  the  way  from  semi-approval  to  positive 
condemnation.  Something  of  this  feeling  continued 
to  manifest  itself  even  after  critics  had  had  time 
enough  to  gather  their  wits  together  sufficiently  to 
understand  what  the  author  was  aiming  at.  But 
even  then  they  could  not  repress  the  desire  that 
Tennyson  should  have  done  something  else.  One 
reviewer  who  admitted  that  in  this  poem  Tennyson 
had  pleaded  the  rights  of  women  ''with  a  force  and 
an  eloquence  which  the  world  has  scarcely  witnessed 
before,"  nevertheless  confessed  his  disappointment  in 
its  character.  He  had  hoped  and  even  anticipated 
from  its  title  that  it  would  be  "some  -wild  and  stirring 
tale  of  the  old  heroic  time,  or,  more  likely  still —  .  .  . 
some  story  wondrous,  but  poetical  withal.'" 

Fortunately  for  these  men,  their  criticisms  have  long 
been  buried  in  the  pages  of  forgotten  or  no  longer 
read  periodicals ;  and  the  only  reason  for  raking  them 
now  out  of  their  dreary  graves,  is  to  make  conspicuous 
the  crass  lack  of  appreciation  with  which  Tennyson 
had   to   contend   before   his   reputation   had   become 

1' Eclectic  Eeview,'  April,  1848,  Vol.  XXIII  (New  Series),  p.  415. 


542  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

so  predominant  that  the  most  foolish  and  foolhardy 
of  even  anonymous  assailants  hardly  ventured  to 
attack  him  directly,  but  was  forced  to  content  him- 
self with  insinuating  depreciation.  But  that  day  had 
not  then  dawned.  It  is  accordingly  worth  while  to 
collect  from  reviews  found  in  periodicals  then  existing 
a  few  expressions  of  opinion  to  denote  the  sort  of 
welcome  which  the  poem  received  at  the  outset  from 
the  professed  leaders  of  public  opinion.  There  was, 
of  course,  the  general  employment  of  the  formula 
which  has  regularly  characterized  feeble  criticism 
from  a  remote  and  even  indefinite  past,  that  the  work 
under  consideration  would  have  been  improved  by 
care  and  condensation.  Omission  and  revision  might 
lead  closely,  at  least,  to  that  high  and  perfect  excel- 
lence clearly  comprehended  by  the  keen  vision  of  the 
reviewer,  but  not  as  yet  discerned  by  the  writer.  But 
it  was  not  so  much  to  the  length  of  the  production  as 
to  its  character  that  exception  was  taken.  The  cry 
arose  at  once  on  every  side.  Why  had  not  Tennyson 
done  something  else?  There  was  a  general  conviction 
expressed  that  he  had  been  guilty  of  the  grossest 
impropriety.  An  essentially  correct  idea  of  the 
twaddle,  calling  itself  criticism,  which  fairly  ran 
rampant  for  the  weeks  immediately  following  the 
publication  of  the  poem,  may  be  gained  from  a  few 
illustrative  citations. 

You  are  mixing  up,  said  one,  the  manners  of  the 
past  and  the  present.  The  different  parts  refuse  to 
amalgamate  with  one  another,  said  a  second.  The 
familiar  and  the  conventional  are  out  of  keeping  with 


THE  PRINCESS  543 

the  earnestness  of  the  ideal,  said  a  third.  Lecture 
rooms  and  chivalric  lists,  modern  pedantry  and  ancient 
romance,  Tennyson  was  told,  are  antagonisms  which 
no  art  can  reconcile.  You  are  uniting  in  one  piece  the 
grave  and  the  burlesque.  The  ideal  and  the  literal 
are  constantly  intermixed.  The  union  of  banter  and 
fancy,  of  the  serious  and  the  satiric,  is  highly  improper. 
These  very  phrases,  and  numerous  others  just  as  silly, 
are  found  in  the  leading  literary  weeklies  of  the  time. 
The  obvious  fact  that  all  this  had  been  done  inten- 
tionally, and  that  this  intention  had  been  proclaimed 
at  the  outset,  did  dawn  at  last  upon  the  mind  of  some 
of  the  reviewers.  But  that  proved  no  benefit  to  the 
author.  He  could  not  escape  from  responsibility  by 
calling  his  poem  a  medley.  He  had  chosen  to  misapply 
his  powers.  The  point  was  insisted  upon  strongly 
that  the  poet  had  no  right  to  compose  works  of  this 
character.  The  consciousness  of  having  selected  an 
eccentric  plan  could  not  fairly  be  held  to  excuse  it. 
One  critic,  when  the  fact  finally  forced  itself  upon  his 
attention  that  all  his  exceptions  had  been  anticipated 
by  the  author  himself,  calmly  took  the  position  that 
the  prologue  explaining  the  origin  and  character  of 
the  work  was  really  an  apologetic  supplement.  He 
derived  great  satisfaction  from  this  assumption. 
"There  is  hope,"  he  remarked,  ''that  an  error  spon- 
taneously discerned  and  confessed  will  in  future  be 
avoided. ' ' 

One   marked   exception   there   was    to   this   almost 
universal  disparagement,  or  at  best  cold  approbation. 


544  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

which  the  poem  at  first  received.  It  came  from 
'Howitt's  Journal."  This  was  a  periodical  of  repute 
indeed,  though  of  comparatively  small  circulation.  It 
praised  both  the  idea  of  the  work  and  its  execution. 
It  hailed  Tennyson  as  the  poet  of  progress ;  and  there 
is  no  question  that  in  regard  to  the  rights  and  true 
social  position  of  woman  he  was  far  in  advance  of  the 
men  of  his  day.  The  article  was  almost  certainly  the 
work  of  Mary  Howitt;  at  least  it  represented  accu- 
rately the  sentiments  she  entertained.  But  her  views, 
regarded  then  as  extreme,  would  little  suit  those  who 
are  persuaded  that  the  salvation  of  humanity  lies  in 
the  possession  of  suffrage.  "Everything,"  she  said  of 
her  sex,  "which  is  necessary  to  develop  her  powers, 
to  perfect  her  nature,  to  establish  her  independence 
as  a  reasonable  creature  .  .  .  must  be  secured  for 
her."  This  involved  not  only  the  wife  standing  on 
an  equal  footing  with  her  husband  before  the  law,  but 
the  possession  of  equal  property  rights.  There,  how- 
ever, she  stopped.  On  every  attempt  to  turn  woman 
into  "a  hard,  bold,  public  and  prating  she-man,"  as 
she  expressed  it,  she  looked  with  aversion.  Accord- 
ingly, she  celebrated  the  "perfect  instinct"  of  the  poet, 
"true  to  nature  and  common  sense."  He  had  shown 
in  his  poem  the  "inevitable  tendency  and  results  of 
the  doctrines  of  those  who,  to  enfranchise  woman, 
would  unwoman  her."  Then  she  quoted  from  it  an 
extract,  in  which,  according  to  her  the  true  philosophy 
of  the  question  was  given,  "clear,  simple,  strong  and 

1  Vol.  Ill,  p.  28. 


THE  PRINCESS  545 

irrefragable."  This  is  the  passage  beginning  with 
the  line, 

The  woman's  cause  is  man's. 

The  words  which  follow  have  an  interest  of  their  own 
because  they  very  certainly  represented  Tennyson's 
view  of  the  relation  of  the  sexes. 

But  favorable  notices  of  the  work,  involving  com- 
prehension not  only  of  its  workmanship  but  of  its 
purport,  were  exceedingly  rare  at  the  outset.  Unin- 
telligent criticism  there  was  in  abundance.  By  the 
periodicals  ha\ing  then  the  largest  circulation  and 
naturally  the  most  influence,  the  work  was  generally 
termed  a  failure.  This  view  was  not  limited  to  such 
as  from  the  beginning  had  looked  upon  Tennyson's 
production  vnth.  ill-concealed  dislike.  It  was  conceded 
with  apparent  reluctance  by  some  who,  after  a  fashion, 
professed  admiration  for  it  and  perhaps  felt  for  it  a 
lukewarm  regard  which  they  in  all  honesty  mistook 
for  that  feeling.  With  his  usual  sensitiveness  to  criti- 
cism Tennyson  was  a  good  deal  distressed  by  the 
hostile  reception  which  the  work  met  at  the  very 
outset.  In  moments  of  depression,  he  expressed  him- 
self as  inclined  to  abandon  any  further  writing  of 
poetry.  Later  indeed  he  is  said  to  have  felt  regret 
that  he  did  not  connect  the  subject  with  some  stronger 
and  more  serious  framework  than  what  he  called  a 
medley.^  If  so,  the  regret  was  very  needless ;  for  at 
the  time  of  its  production  a  framework  of  the  sort  he 
chose  was  much  the  most  effective  for  the  end  he  had 

iF.  W.  Farrar's  'Men  I  have  Known,'  1897,  p.  19. 


546  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

in  view.  He  was  dealing  with  what  was  to  him  a 
serious  theme ;  and  to  most  men  of  that  day  it  was  not 
serious.  If,  however,  the  adverse  criticism  troubled 
him  at  first,  it  could  not  have  troubled  him  long,  as  it 
ought  not  to  have  troubled  him  at  all.  The  hostility 
of  anonymous  reviewers,  whose  opinions,  if  their 
names  were  kno^vn,  it  would  have  seemed  peculiarly 
absurd  to  heed,  were  soon  forgotten  in  the  welcome 
which  the  work  received  from  the  great  body  of 
cultivated  men. 

Tennyson  himself  seems  to  have  been  as  little  aware 
as  were  the  majority  of  the  early  critics  of  'The 
Princess'  of  the  change  which  had  taken  place  in  his 
position  from  the  time  when  he  had  made  his  first 
appearance  as  an  author.  The  sort  of  hostility  which 
might  have  brought  about  an  adverse  reception  of  a 
little-known  poet,  such  as  he  was  in  1832,  would  have 
the  slightest  possible  effect  upon  the  fortunes  of  one 
whose  reputation  was  now  solidly  established.  It  very 
speedily  became  evident  that  he  had  now  gained  an 
audience  that  evinced  not  the  slightest  disposition  to 
take  the  opinion  of  his  productions  from  the  hasty 
examination  of  men  engaged  under  pressure  in  the 
weekly  task  of  applause  or  condemnation.  In  all 
great  work  the  sense  of  its  greatness  grows  upon 
readers,  the  more  time  they  have  to  make  themselves 
familiar  mth  it.  Accordingly  the  commendation  of 
even  the  exceedingly  few  who  had  been  outspoken  in 
their  praise  at  the  beginning  seemed  very  faint  when 
contrasted  with  the  fer\id  eulogies  which  later  came 
to  appear. 


THE  PRINCESS  547 

As  weeks  went  on  the  appreciation  of  the  poem 
advanced  not  only  steadily  but  rapidly.  With  its 
growing  popularity  naturally  went  along  its  increas- 
ing sale.  The  detractors  who  had  been  specially 
vociferous  when  the  book  made  its  first  appearance 
were  in  no  short  time  reduced  to  silence  if  not  to 
repentance.  The  general  interest  in  it  and  admiration 
for  it,  with  the  consequent  familiarity  with  it  which 
followed,  are  made  manifest  by  the  number  of  lines 
and  phrases  which  have  been  contributed  from  it  to 
our  stock  of  common  quotations.  This  is  no  necessary 
proof  of  the  excellence  of  a  work ;  but  it  is  a  conclusive 
one  as  to  its  popularity.  The  general  approbation  the 
poem  met  soon  showed  itself  in  the  changed  tone  of 
the  critical  press.  It  is  very  noticeable  in  the  case 
of  this  publication  that  the  longer  the  reviews  of  it 
were  delayed,  the  more  cordial  and  appreciative  they 
were.  When  the  shock  produced  by  the  unexpected 
character  of  the  work  had  been  dissipated,  the  exceed- 
ing foolishness  of  the  early  hostile  notices  of  it  struck 
men  forcibly.  In  more  than  one  instance,  attempts 
were  made  in  the  later  criticisms  to  correct  the 
unintelligent  misapprehensions  which  had  character- 
ized the  earlier.  Their  complete  misunderstanding  of 
the  nature  and  intention  of  the  poem  was  brought  out 
distinctly.  Accordingly,  with  the  progress  of  time  the 
contemporary  praise  of  *The  Princess'  was  more  and 
more  loudly  expressed.  It  may  be  said  to  have  culmi- 
nated in  Aubrey  de  Vere  's  review  in  the  '  Edinburgh,  '^ 
in  which  excessive  laudation  of  the  work  as  a  whole 

1  Vol,  XC,  p.  388,  October,  1849. 


548  LIFE  AND  TBIES  OF  TENNYSON 

was  mingled  with  the  scantiest  measure  of  criticism 
of  details;  and  again  in  the  enthusiastic  eulogy 
which  Charles  Kingsley  paid  it  about  a  year  later  in 
'Fraser's  Magazine.'^ 

These  later  reviews  had  done  indeed  little  more  than 
record  what  had  come  to  be  the  opinion  of  the  educated 
public.  This  had  declared  itself  unmistakably  in  the 
reception  given  to  the  poem.  In  its  case,  Tennyson's 
frequent,  one  might  almost  call  it  his  regular,  expe- 
rience had  been  repeated.  This  was  the  cool  reception 
of  any  new  work  of  his,  if  not  its  actual  condemnation, 
by  the  great  body  of  its  early  critics,  and  its  enthu- 
siastic welcome  and  constantly  increasing  appreciation 
by  the  great  body  of  cultivated  readers.  As  in  so 
many  other  instances  the  public  was  altogether  wiser 
than  those  who  assumed  to  advise  it.  The  number  of 
copies  of  the  first  edition  has  been  given  as  two 
thousand;^  but  the  poet's  reputation  was  now  so 
firmly  established  that  this  number  must  have  been 
exceeded  in  those  which  were  later  put  upon  the 
market.  The  dates  of  the  successive  editions  bear 
convincing  witness  to  the  steadily  growing  popularity 
of  the  work.  Indeed,  Charles  Kingsley  in  his  review 
of  Tennyson's  poetry  in  1850,  while  giving  enthusiastic 
praise  to  'The  Princess,'  forbore  to  make  many 
quotations  from  it  on  the  avowed  ground  that  such  a 
course  was  unnecessary  because  the  poem  was  already 
familiar  to  every  one. 

1  Vol.  XLII,  p.  245,  September,  1850. 

2  Wise 's  '  Bibliography  of  the  Writings  of  Alfred,  Lord  Tennyson, ' 
Vol.  I,  p.  100. 


THE  PRINCESS  549 

Singular,  indeed,  and  altogether  exaggerated  trib- 
utes to  the  greatness  of  the  poem  came,  too,  from 
quarters  where  naturally  they  would  seem  little  to  be 
expected.  One  in  particular  was  from  the  Praeraph- 
aelite  circle.  Students  of  literature  come  to  be  fairly 
familiar  wdth  the  critical  vagaries  of  eminent  men 
of  letters,  their  ability  to  find  exquisite  pleasure 
in  what  the  rest  of  the  world  finds  unendurable,  and 
the  height  to  which  they  carry  their  enthusiasm  for 
works  which  appear  to  others  merely  excellent.  It 
is  well  known  that  it  was  only  in  the  Praeraphaelite 
circle  that  Browning  found  approvers  and  applauders 
in  the  days  of  his  obscuration  after  the  publication  of 
his  'Sordello.'  Unpopular  and  unread  everywhere 
else,  his  works  were  hailed  by  them  as  of  highest 
value  and  significance.  In  his  diary  under  date  of 
December  8,  1849,  William  Rossetti  reports  a  conver- 
sation between  his  brother  and  the  sculptor  and  poet, 
Woolner.  The  conclusion  at  which  they  aimed  mani- 
festly struck  him  as  bordering  on  the  treasonable. 
''Woolner,"  he  tells  us,  ''came  in  the  evening,  when 
Gabriel  read  The  Princess  through  to  him,  and  both 
of  them  pronounced  it  the  finest  poem  since  Shake- 
speare, superior  even  to  Sordello/^  The  veteran 
student  of  literature  becomes  so  hardened  to  the 
numerous  works  which  have  been  pronounced  by 
competent  judges  the  finest  since  Shakespeare  that 
this  particular  commendation  is  not  likely  of  itself  to 
make  any  special  impression.  It  is  the  concluding 
clause,  "superior  even  to  Sordello,^^  that  brings 
surprise  and  delight.    But  to  the  reporter  of  the  con- 


550  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

versation  it  brought  pain.  The  younger  Rossetti  tells 
us  he  could  not  agree  with  the  wild  ebullition  of 
enthusiasm  which  reckoned  'The  Princess'  superior 
even  to  '  Sordello. '  ' '  To  the  latter  opinion, ' '  he  added, 
"I  demur.'" 

Reluctant  testimony  to  the  favor  the  poem  had  met 
with,  had  been  borne  shortly  after  its  publication  by 
FitzGerald,  who  had  now  begun  to  take  up  the  role 
which  he  never  laid  aside,  of  mourning  over  the  failure 
of  Tennyson  to  reach  some  lofty  but  unnamed  ideal, 
which  he  himself  professed  to  have  in  mind  but  never 
clearly  outlined.  In  a  letter  of  May,  1848,  to  Frederick 
Tennyson,  he  expressed  his  dissatisfaction  with  the 
poem;  but  he  admitted  that  he  was  singular  in  his 
opinion.  ''I  am  considered,"  he  added,  "a  great 
heretic  for  abusing  it ;  it  seems  to  me  a  wretched  waste 
of  power  at  a  time  of  life  when  a  man  ought  to  be  doing 
his  best ;  and  I  almost  feel  hopeless  about  Alfred  now. 
I  mean,  about  his  doing  what  he  was  born  to  do."  As 
these  words  prove,  FitzGerald  was  not  satisfied  with 
the  work.  He  indeed  was  not  satisfied  with  anything 
that  Tennyson  wrote  after  the  appearance  of  the 
volumes  of  1842.  In  his  opinion,  everything  which 
came  out  subsequently  indicated  a  falling-off.  Some- 
how the  poet  had  failed  to  fulfil  his  early  promise. 
Exactly  what  he  desired  his  friend  to  do,  it  is  no  easy 
matter  to  make  out.  Had  he  been  called  upon  to  define 
it  himself  in  precise  terms,  he  would  in  all  probability 
have  abandoned  the  task  in  despair.  At  any  rate  if 
it  were  clear  to  his  own  mind,  he  never  made  it  clear 

1 ' Praeraphaelite  Diaries,'  edited  by  W.  M.  Rossetti,  p.  236. 


THE  PRINCESS  551 

to  the  mind  of  any  one  else.  Tennyson  manifestly 
could  never  have  satisfied  him.  What  he  wanted  him 
to  do,  whatever  it  was,  was  always  something  different 
from  what  he  did  do.  'The  Princess'  did  not  suit  him. 
'In  Memoriam'  did  not  suit  him.  'Maud'  did  not  suit 
him.  Both  Carlyle  and  himself,  he  said,  gave  the  poet 
up  after  the  production  of  '  The  Princess. ' 

The  opinions  of  two  men  of  genius,  but  peculiarly 
crotchety  in  their  notions,  are  of  not  much  real  signifi- 
cance. FitzGerald  in  particular  was  a  man  of  curious 
tastes  and  prejudices,  of  curious  likes  and  dislikes. 
He  rated  Frederick  Tennyson  as  being  almost  as  great 
a  poet  as  Alfred.  He  could  not  endure  Jane  Austen. 
He  could  not  read  George  Eliot.  With  Browning  in 
particular,  he  had  no  patience  whatever,  and  even  less, 
were  that  possible,  with  the  men  who  were  chanting 
his  praises.  "I  abuse  Bro^vning  myself,"  he  wrote 
to  Tennyson  late  in  1867,  "and  get  others  to  abuse 
him ;  and  write  to  you  about  it ;  for  the  sake  of  easing 
my  own  heart — not  yours.  Why  is  it  .  .  .  that,  while 
the  Magazine  critics  are  belauding  him,  not  one  of  the 
men  I  know,  who  are  not  inferior  to  the  writers  in  the 
Athenaeum,  Edinburgh,  etc.  can  endure,  and  (for  the 
most  part)  can  read  him  at  all?"  Then  he  went  on  to 
quote  the  opinions  of  Cowell,  Thompson,  Donne,  and 
Carlyle.  Even  Pollock  himself,  who  was  a  great  friend 
of  Browning,  admitted  that  he  could  not  succeed  in 
getting  through  'The  Ring  and  the  Book,'  though  he 
had  tried  to  do  so  three  times.  Accordingly,  he  pre- 
tended to  have  read  it  and  let  the  poet  so  suppose. 


552  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

"Who  then,"  continued  FitzGerald,  "are  the  people 
that  write  the  nonsense  in  the  Reviews?'" 

FitzGerald 's  estimates  of  English  poetry  and  poets 
were  certainly  never  of  the  conventional  sort.  They 
make  his  belief  in  his  own  critical  insight  more  a 
matter  of  curiosity  than  of  trust.  He  had  little  admira- 
tion for  Shelley.  "What  a  fuss,"  he  wrote,  "the 
cockneys  make  about  Shelley  just  now,  surely  not 
worth  Keats'  little  finger."-  S\vinbunie  met  with  no 
favor  in  his  eyes.  Matthew  Arnold  he  set  do\vn  as 
"a  pedant."  "Is  Mr.  Rossetti  a  Great  Poet  like 
Bro^\Tiing  and  Morris ? "  he  wrote.  ' '  So  the  Athenceum 
tells  me.  Dear  me,  how  thick  Great  Poets  do  grow 
nowadays."  On  the  other  hand  he  clung  to  Crabbe 
with  a  devotion  almost  pathetic  after  that  author  had 
become  to  the  rest  of  the  world,  save  the  special 
student  of  literature,  little  more  than  a  name.  Still, 
though  he  professed  himself  disappointed  in  Tenny- 
son's not  having  accomplished  the  work,  whatever 
that  was,  he  was  appointed  to  do,  he  never  abandoned 
his  faith  in  him  as  the  greatest  genius  of  his  genera- 
tion. The  regard  which  existed  between  him  and  the 
Paltry  Poet,  as  he  was  wont  to  designate  him  in  the 
letters  he  wrote  to  Tennyson's  wife,  never  knew 
abatement.  It  must  always  be  a  matter  of  regret  that 
he  did  not  live  to  read  the  affectionate  dedication  to 
himself  of  the  volume  entitled  'Tiresias,'  which  his 
own  sudden  death  snatched  from  his  sight  just  as  it 
was  on  the  point  of  coming  out. 

1' Tennyson  and  his  Friends,'  p.  118,  article  by  Dr.  Warren,  Presi- 
dent of  Magdalen. 

2  Jbid.,  p.  121,  article  by  Dr.  Warren. 


THE  PRINCESS  553 

There  is,  however,  no  question  that  there  was  agree- 
ment in  other  quarters  with  FitzGerald's  general  view ; 
though,  had  it  come  to  specific  detail,  there  would  have 
been  wide  dissent.  It  is  a  striking  illustration  of  the 
hold  that  Tennyson  had  already  gained  over  the  minds 
of  men  that  so  many  were  eager  to  point  out  to  him 
the  precise  path  it  was  his  duty  to  follow.  One 
persistent  demand  was  made  upon  him  by  the  critical 
fraternity  that  he  should  set  out  to  produce  some  one 
great  work,  apparently  some  bulky  work.  Even 
Spedding,  the  sagest  of  all  his  friends,  in  his  review 
of  the  'Poems'  of  1842,  pressed  upon  him  the  necessity 
of  concentrating  his  energies  upon  a  production  of 
this  character.  Exactly  what  his  advisers  had  in  mind 
was  indeed  left  very  vague.  The  review  of  'The 
Princess'  in  'The  Examiner' — pretty  certainly  the 
work  of  John  Forster — was  about  the  only  early 
article  in  the  influential  weekly  critical  press  of  that 
time  which  was  outspoken  in  its  praise.  Yet  the  critic, 
while  conceding  the  poem  to  be  a  great  advance  upon 
the  previous  productions  of  its  author,  complained  that 
it  was  not  great  enough.  Why  did  he  not  do  something 
else  ?  The  ' '  set, ' '  he  was  told,  whose  tastes  and  prefer- 
ences he  was  too  much  in  the  habit  of  consulting,  was 
not  the  world  for  which  he  should  be  writing.  It  soon 
became  manifest  that  this  set  embraced  about  all  the 
w^orld  Avhose  opinions  were  worth  heeding. 

Why,  further,  said  the  critic,  does  not  Tennyson 
assume  his  mission?  Why  had  he  discredited  it  with 
trifling  and  unworthy  puerilities?  "Mission"  was 
the  burden  under  which  the  unfortunate  poet  of  those 


554  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

days  was  compelled  to  stagger,  just  as  now  he  is  under 
the  necessity  of  bearing  a  * 'message."  Tennyson's 
mission,  so  far  as  it  can  be  made  out  from  the  some- 
what obscure  utterances  of  the  time,  was  to  write  a 
big  book,  a  solemn  book,  in  which  there  should  be  no 
grafting  of  the  burlesque  upon  the  serious,  a  book 
which  all  critics  would  agree  in  mentioning  with 
respect  if  not  with  praise,  and  which  all  persons  really 
fond  of  poetry  would  carefully  avoid  reading.  To 
advice  of  this  sort  Tennyson  then  turned  a  deaf  ear. 
He  wrote  much,  and  in  many  measures,  and  on  many 
subjects.  But  he  must  have  been  aware — if  he  was 
not,  other  men  were — that  he  was  pre-eminently  a 
lyric  poet.  As  a  lyric  poet  he  will  alwaj'^s  be  best  and 
most  permanently  known.  Lyric  productions,  further- 
more, have  the  advantage  of  being  comparatively 
brief.  Long  poems  will,  without  doubt,  always  con- 
tinue to  be  written;  seldom  will  they  become  familiar 
to  many.  The  instances  are  rare  in  which  a  single  one 
of  them  will  reach  more  than  a  limited  circle  of 
readers.  Even  to  the  majority  of  these  it  will  not 
appeal  for  more  than  a  limited  time.  There  are 
those  who  think  it  will  deserve  that  fate  only. 
Few  certainly  there  are  who  would  not  gladly  exchange 
whole  books  of  'The  Excursion'  for  three  compara- 
tively short  pieces  equal  to  the  'Lines  on  Tintern 
Abbey,'  'Laodamia'  and  the  'Ode  on  the  Intimations 
of  Immortality.' 

Besides  writing  a  work,  the  matter  and  manner  of 
which  did  not  conform  to  the  preconceptions  of  his 
early  critics  and  which  did  not  suit  what  they  called 


THE  PRINCESS  555 

their  taste,  and  incidentally  failing  to  fulfil  his  mission, 
there  was  in  their  eyes  a  still  further  grievance.  In 
this  work,  Tennyson  had  made  some  daring  experi- 
ments in  meter.  Certain  of  them  he  himself  may  in 
time  have  been  led  to  regard  as  too  daring.  He  had 
been  a  careful  student  of  blank  verse,  and  had  come 
to  feel  that  in  order  to  have  it  produce  its  proper 
effect,  the  monotony  of  the  regularly  recurring  rhythm 
must  be  varied,  so  far  as  the  measure  would  permit. 
It  is  manifest  to  any  serious  student  of  the  poet's 
writings  that  all  these  variations  from  the  normal 
were  made  designedly.  They  were  made,  too,  with 
that  consummate  mastery  of  versification  which 
Tennyson  invariably  manifested.  But  to  the  critics 
who  counted  syllables,  to  whom  any  violation  of 
exactitude  was  a  crime,  his  disregard  of  conventional 
rules  was  an  unforgivable  offence.  It  was  generally 
agreed  that  either  the  poet  could  not  scan,  or  that  he 
considered  himself  too  great  a  person  to  adapt  his 
verses  to  any  such  requirement.  The  latter  was  the 
general  view.  Accordingly,  he  was  solemnly  warned 
that  correct  monotony  is  less  displeasing  than  awkward 
and  unnecessary  license. 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  much  of  Tennyson's  finest 
metrical  workmanship  is  found  in  'The  Princess.' 
Such  was  his  o^vn  opinion.  ' '  Some  of  the  blank  verse 
in  this  poem  is  among  the  best  I  ever  wrote,"  he  said 
later.  But  these  daring  experiments  in  versification 
annoyed  and  confounded,  or  rather  outraged  his  early 
critics.  They  gave  unmeasured  vent  to  their  dissatis- 
faction.   They  spoke  of  them  as  exhibiting  not  liberty 


556  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

but  license.  ''False  and  deficient  quantities,"  said 
one  of  the  London  literary  weeklies,  "occur  with  a 
frequency  which  suggest  that  they  have  been  deliber- 
ately adopted."  ''The  merest  mechanics  of  verse- 
making  are  frequently  disregarded,"  said  another. 
Then  it  proceeded  to  quote  a  passage  as  prose  which 
it  said  might  be  broken  up  into  lines  but  could  not  be 
turned  into  verse.  This  obstacle  more  intelligent 
readers  have  succeeded  in  overcoming.  "There  is," 
said  one  of  the  silliest  of  these  early  reviews,  "a  total 
indifference  to  the  artistical  rules  of  verse  or  the 
commonest  semblance  of  poetry,  which  not  only  pre- 
vents all  choice  or  charm  of  manner  supplying  some 
of  the  defects  of  matter  and  subject,  but  continually 
repels  the  reader  unless  when  it  excites  his  surprise." 
Such  was  the  general  tone  of  much  of  the  early  criti- 
cism which  occasionally  extended  even  to  later.  It 
never  evidently  occurred  to  any  of  these  writers  that 
a  man  who  was  a  great  poet  might  possibly  under- 
stand the  nature  of  the  vehicle  he  employed  as  well 
as  those  who  could  not  attain  to  the  dignity  of  being 
even  small  poets;  indeed  might  even  understand  it 
better. 

All  views  of  this  sort  died  out  finally  with  the 
progress  of  intelligence ;  but  at  the  time  itself  the  only 
defence  of  Tennyson's  practice  which  has  fallen  under 
my  own  observation  came  out  in  an  American  review 
of  the  poem.^  This  was  the  work  of  Professor  Hadley, 
whose  comparatively  early  death  was  one  of  the 
greatest  losses  which  scholarship  in  this  country  has 

1  'New  Englander,'  Vol.  VII,  p.  193,  May,  1849. 


THE  PRINCESS  557 

ever  been  compelled  to  suffer.  Hadley  pointed  out 
the  extraordinary  pains  that  had  been  taken  in  the 
construction  of  the  verse,  and  the  skill  with  which 
this  had  been  accomplished.  He  spoke  in  detail  of 
Tennyson's  bold  adoption  of  rhythmical  and  metrical 
expedients  which  had  once  been  in  regular  use,  but 
had  now  come  to  be  discredited  by  the  finical  taste  of 
later  times.  For  this  freedom,  stigmatized  as  license, 
had  been  substituted  a  passion  for  monotonous  uni- 
formity. From  this  servility  to  mere  form  the  poet 
had  broken  away.  Among  the  various  instances  of 
this  revolt  from  modern  punctiliousness  he  specified 
the  occurrence  in  the  line  of  syllables  beyond  the 
orthodox  number:  the  substitution  of  a  trochaic  foot 
for  an  iambic;  the  blending  of  the  final  vowel  of  one 
word  ^vith  the  initial  syllable  of  the  one  following, 
especially  when  the  latter  begins  mth  a  vowel  or  weak 
consonant,  or  rather  its  rapid  pronunciation  so  that 
the  foot  was  apparently  not  lengthened.  As  a  result 
of  this  last  proceeding,  a  short  syllable  was  sometimes 
treated  as  if  it  formed  no  place  in  the  meter,  and 
a  dissyllable  was  in  consequence  converted  into  a 
monosyllable. 

In  America  the  edition  of  'The  Princess'  was 
brought  out  in  February,  1848,  nearly  two  months 
after  its  appearance  in  England.'     Nowhere  have  I 

1  In  his  journal  under  date  of  January  25,  1848,  Longfellow  tells 
us  that  he  ' '  found  Fields  correcting  the  proofs  of  the  second  edition 
of  Tennyson's  Princess,  the  first,  one  thousand  copies,  having  been  sold 
within  a  few  weeks"  ('Life  of  Henry  Wadsworth  Longfellow,'  Vol.  II, 
p,  109).  This  is  somewhat  inexplicable.  According  to  all  other  testi- 
mony there  is  no  record  of  the  publication  of  the  work  in  this  country 
before  the  middle  of  February,  and  the  first  American  edition  bears 
the  date  of  1848.    For  one  proof  out  of  many,  the  Boston  correspondent 


558  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

been  able  to  discover  in  the  critical  literature  of  this 
country  anything  resembling  the  hostile  attitude 
assumed  towards  the  poem  by  the  English  weekly 
press  on  its  publication.  The  commendation  in  certain 
instances  was  more  or  less  half-hearted,  but  there 
must  have  been  but  little  outspoken  condemnation. 
Of  course,  there  prevailed  also  a  certain  amount  of 
the  usual  perfunctory  criticism.  Especially  was  this 
to  be  found  in  the  quarters  where  still  lingered  the 
habit  of  re-echoing  the  opinion  expressed  in  England. 
The  various  and  varying  sentiments  entertained  by 
admirers  and  censurers  can  be  found  adequately 
represented  in  a  dialogue  between  three  different 
imaginary  characters,  written  by  Charles  Astor 
Bristed  and  entitled  *A  Talk  about  the  Princess.'^ 
There  is  in  this  article  another  one  of  those  singular 
literary  prophecies  which  rise  up  constantly  to  con- 
found those  who  are  disposed  to  put  their  faith  in 
the  predictions  of  critics.  The  man  who  was  soon 
to  become  the  most  popular  poet  of  the  century  in  all 
English-speaking  lands,  we  are  told  here,  was  then 
and  always  is  to  be  ^'caviare  to  the  general."  Even 
at  the  time  this  view  would  hardly  be  borne  out  by  a 
good  deal  of  the  criticism  which  the  work  had  already 
everywhere  received.    There  was  indeed  expressed  on 

of  'The  New  York  Literary  World,'  under  date  of  February  5,  announces 
as  the  most  remarkable  event  of  the  year  that  a  new  poem  by  Tennyson 
was  soon  to  appear,  called  'The  Princess.'  He  had  been  privileged  to 
see  the  proof  sheets  and  from  the  work  he  quoted  a  number  of  passages. 
Furthermore,  it  was  not  until  the  number  of  the  'Literary  World'  for 
February  26  that  Ticknor  advertised  the  poem  as  having  just  been 
published.  Longfellow  apparently  must  have  been  told  of  some  new 
edition  of  the  '  Poems '  previously  published. 

1  'The  American  Review,  a  Whig  Journal,'  for  July,  1848. 


THE  PRINCESS  559 

this  side  of  the  Atlantic  in  several  quarters  a  degree 
of  praise  for  the  poem  which  might  justly  be  called 
extravagant  even  by  its  warmest  admirers.  It  is 
evident  that  by  this  time  Tennyson  had  gained  a  body 
of  enthusiastic  partisans  in  this  country. 

There  is  remarkable  proof  of  this  in  one  American 
criticism,  which  is  worthy  of  special  mention.  It  came 
from  James  Russell  Lowell  and  is  found  in  'The 
Massachusetts  Quarterly  Review,'  a  periodical  which 
flourished  from  1848  to  1850.^  As  it  appeared  in  a 
publication  which  had  but  a  short  life,  as  it  has  never 
been  included  in  any  reprint  of  Lowell's  works,  and 
is  practically  no  longer  accessible  to  most  readers,  it 
is  worth  while  to  give  a  fairly  faithful  summary  of 
its  contents;  for  it  represents  very  accurately  the 
feelings  which  had  now  come  to  prevail  among  the 
young  and  ardent  partisans  of  the  poet,  and  in  par- 
ticular the  contemptuous  attitude  they  had  begun  to 
assume  towards  his  decriers.  The  opening  part  of  it 
was  according  to  all  appearance  aimed  at  the  critical 
comment  which  had  been  published  in  the  London 
literary  weeklies;  for  there  is  very  little  to  be  found 
in  the  notices  the  work  received  on  this  side  of  the 
Atlantic  to  deserve  the  censure  to  which  Lowell  gave 
utterance.  His  words  are  further  noticeable  because 
the  writer  came  to  be  somewhat  critical  of  Tennyson, 
as  his  own  life  drew  to  a  close.  In  Lowell's  opinion 
the  poet's  later  production  did  not  stand  on  as  high 
a  level  of  achievement  as  his  earlier.  It  will  perhaps 
be   conceded   by   the   majority   of   his   most   fervent 

1  Vol.  I,  pp.  256-259,  March,  1848. 


560  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

admirers  that  with  a  few  magnificent  exceptions,  what 
Tennyson  wrote  after  the  age  of  fifty  did  not  come  up 
to  what  he  wrote  during  his  first  thirty  years  of 
authorship. 

Lowell  opened  his  review  of  this  ''delicious  poem," 
as  at  the  end  he  styled  it,  with  contemptuous  remarks 
upon  those  who  had  decried  it.  He  had  heard,  he  said, 
that  Timms  had  pronounced  it  an  entire  failure. 
Timms,  he  added,  is  the  man  who  protects  his  fellow 
citizens  from  being  too  easily  pleased.  He  has  a 
battery  erected,  mounted  with  what  he  calls  the 
received  canons  of  criticism;  is  familiar  with  all 
schools  of  poetry  and  looks  at  them  from  the  same 
point  of  view.  The  public,  he  thought,  had  a  curious 
predilection  for  having  its  opinions  made  up  for  it 
by  the  Timmses.  This  is  perhaps  true,  at  least  for 
a  time  in  the  case  of  unknown  authors;  but  it  will 
hardly  hold  good  of  those  of  them  who  have  already 
achieved  reputation.  At  all  events,  it  is  manifest  that 
in  this  instance  Lowell  was  very  far  from  sharing  in 
the  opinion  w^hich  he  had  ascribed  to  Timms.  Nowhere 
can  there  be  found  in  contemporary,  or  for  that 
matter,  in  later  criticism,  a  more  glowing  tribute  to 
the  excellence  of  both  poem  and  poet.  "We  read  the 
book  through,"  he  wrote,  "with  a  pleasure  which 
heightened  to  unqualified  delight,  and  ended  in  admira- 
tion. The  poem  is  unique  in  conception  and  execution. 
It  is  one  of  the  few  instances  in  literature  where  a 
book  is  so  true  to  the  idiosyncrasy  of  its  author  that 
we  cannot  conceive  of  the  possibility  of  its  being 
written  by  any  other  person,  no  matter  how  gifted." 


THE  PRINCESS  561 

Lowell  further  added  a  remark  to  the  effect  that 
the  very  excellence  of  Tennyson's  workmanship  had 
to  a  certain  extent  led  to  the  depreciation  of  it,  or,  at 
any  rate,  to  the  lack  of  appreciation.  ''His  conception 
is  always  clear, ' '  he  said,  ' '  his  means  exactly  adequate, 
and  his  finish  perfect.  So  entirely  free  is  he  from  any 
appearance  of  effort,  that  many  have  been  led  to  under- 
rate him,  and  to  praise  his  delicacy  at  the  expense  of 
his  strength. ' '  All  of  Lowell 's  review  was  in  keeping 
with  these  preliminary  criticisms.  Indeed  he  may 
almost  be  said  to  have  rivalled  Poe  in  the  degree  of 
praise  he  gave  to  the  poet.  ''Perfection  of  form," 
was  his  conclusion,  "seems  to  be  with  him  a  natural 
instinct,  not  an  attainment."  "We  must  therefore 
regard  'The  Princess,'  "  he  went  on  to  say,  "as  the 
work  of  a  master,  and  it  must  argue  a  poverty  in  our- 
selves, if  we  cannot  see  it  as  a  harmonious  whole. 
For  so  perfect  is  Tennyson's  appreciation  of  his  own 
strength,  that  he  has  never  in  a  single  instance  fallen 
below  himself.  His  self-command  is  not  the  least 
wonderful  quality  in  him."  Lowell  was  especially 
struck  by  his  profound  and  delicate  comprehension 
of  female  character  as  shown  in  the  poem.  One  result 
of  it,  he  pointed  out,  w^as  the  gradual  absorption  of 
the  writer  in  his  subject,  the  growing  predominance 
of  the  poet  over  the  mere  story-teller,  as  the  higher 
relations  existing  between  his  characters  appealed  to 
him,  and  the  creative  faculty  felt  itself  more  and  more 
tasked. 

It  has  been  worth  while  to  give  a  full  account  of  the 
early  derogatory  contemporary  criticism,  not  so  much 


562  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

because  it  is  occasionally  echoed  at  the  present  day, 
but  because  it  exemplifies  the  state  of  mind  with  which 
any  great  work  of  art  is  approached  by  a  certain  class 
of  persons,  if  it  presents  anything  novel  in  its  plan 
or  treatment.  The  one  thing  that  shocks  these  critics 
above  everything  else  is  originalit5^  They  have 
formed  for  themselves  certain  canons  by  which  to 
judge  the  works  brought  to  their  consideration.  If 
any  production  fails  to  conform  to  these,  it  never 
occurs  to  them  that  it  is  not  the  work  under  exami- 
nation which  is  at  fault  but  the  canons  they  have 
adopted.  We  have  had  occasion  to  see  that  the  history 
of  this  poem  shows  how  speedily  the  verdict  of  the 
general  public  of  the  cultivated  class  overrode  the 
unfavorable  pronouncements  of  its  earliest  critics. 
The  reason  is  obvious.  In  certain  ways  'The  Princess' 
is  one  of  the  most  perfect  of  Tennyson's  works.  This 
is  not  to  say  that  it  is  highest  in  aim  or  noblest  in 
subject,  though  both  aim  and  subject  are  high  and 
noble.  But  in  variety  of  interest,  in  the  due  proportion 
of  means  to  ends,  in  the  marvellous  adaptation  of 
treatment  of  the  varying  conditions  of  the  subject- 
matter,  never  degenerating  into  the  purely  burlesque, 
never  straining  beyond  the  legitimate  expression  of 
high-wrought  feeling — and  both  these  temptations 
beset  the  poet  constantly — he  has  succeeded  in  pro- 
ducing within  its  limitations  what  might  in  justice 
be  called  a  nearly  perfect  work  of  art. 

It  is  observable,  as  suggested  by  Lowell,  that,  as  the 
action  proceeds,  whatever  there  is  of  mock-heroic  in 
the  character  of  the  heroine  or  of  the  story  itself, 


I 


THE  PRINCESS  563 

fades  more  and  more  into  the  background  as  the  play 
of  the  great  elemental  forces  which  control  the  lives 
of  all  of  us  becomes  predominant.  Inevitably,  perhaps 
unconsciously,  the  voice  of  the  poet  assumes  a  loftier 
tone  as  his  high  conception  of  the  true  relation  of  the 
sexes  reveals  itself  with  distincter  clearness  to  his 
mental  vision.  This  more  and  more  absorbed  his 
thoughts  and  feelings  as  he  proceeded  in  the  narration 
of  the  story,  and  gradually  changed  the  character  of 
the  work  from  its  original  intention.  He  himself 
recognized  the  fact  and  acknowledged  it  in  the  con- 
clusion.   In  the  original  version,  he  said, 

Here  closed  our  compound  story  which  at  first 

Had  only  meant  to  banter  little  maids 

With  mock-heroics  and  with  parody; 

But  slipt  in  some  strange  way,  crost  with  burlesque, 

From  mock  to  earnest,  even  into  tones 

Of  tragic. 

All  this  was  changed  in  the  third  edition  of  1850.  In 
that  the  poet  dilated  still  further  upon  the  fact  of  this 
transition  from  the  mock  to  the  real  heroic.  Incident- 
ally, too,  he  revealed  his  own  sensitiveness  to  the 
criticism  of  which  he  had  been  made  the  subject.  As 
the  conclusion  now  stands,  the  words  read  as  follows : 

What  style  could  suit  ? 
The  men  required  that  I  should  give  throughout 
The  sort  of  mock-heroic  gigantesque, 
With  which  we  banter 'd  little  Lilia  first: 
The  women — and  perhaps  they  felt  their  power, 
For  something  in  the  ballads  which  they  sang, 
Or  in  their  silent  influence  as  they  sat, 


564  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

Had  ever  seem'd  to  wrestle  with  burlesque, 

And  drove  us,  last,  to  quite  a  solemn  close — 

They  hated  banter,  wish'd  for  something  real, 

A  gallant  fight,  a  noble  princess — why 

Not  make  her  true-heroic — true-sublime? 

Or  all,  they  said,  as  earnest  as  the  close  ? 

"Which  yet  with  such  a  framework  scarce  could  be. 

Then  rose  a  little  feud  betwixt  the  two. 

Betwixt  the  mockers  and  the  realists : 

And  I,  betwixt  them  both,  to  please  them  both. 

And  yet  to  give  the  story  as  it  rose, 

I  moved  as  in  a  strange  diagonal. 

And  maybe  neither  pleased  myself  nor  them. 

The  one  serious  defect  in  the  poem  is  the  essentially 
uninteresting  character  of  the  Prince.  We  do  not 
expect  indeed  in  the  hero  of  a  tale,  who  is  also  its 
narrator,  a  proclamation,  still  less  an  exaltation  of 
the  heroic  in  his  own  nature.  Still,  to  make  him  an 
object  of  regard  for  the  reader  there  should  be  a 
suggestion  of  its  possibility.  Mild  and  amiable  he  is 
represented  as  being,  mth  not  merely  correct  but  noble 
sentiments,  and  with  fullest  devotion  to  the  woman 
whom  he  has  never  seen  but  to  whom  he  has  been 
proxy-wedded.  Furthermore,  we  can  concede  him  the 
fullest  sympathy  with  the  ends  at  which  his  destined 
bride  aims,  though  not  sharing  her  belief  in  the  means 
to  attain  it  or  in  the  proper  relation  of  the  sexes.  But 
everywhere  in  the  poem  is  left  on  the  reader's  mind 
the  feeling  that  there  is  something  lacking  in  the 
character — the  impression  of  a  certain  gentleness, 
tending  to  degenerate  into  feebleness,  the  attitude  of 
a  love-sick  boy,  not  that  of  a  strong,  earnest,  and 


THE  PRINCESS  565 

determined  man.  The  Prince  is  not  ignobly  weak,  but 
still  he  is  weak;  and  the  sense  of  his  weakness  is 
rendered  more  emphatic  by  its  contrast  with  the 
strength  and  loftiness  of  the  nature  of  the  Princess, 
who  with  all  her  errors  is  not  only  every  inch  a  woman, 
but  every  inch  a  queen.  All  this  was  manifest  in  the 
poem  as  it  originally  appeared;  but  in  the  later 
and  definitive  form  it  assumed,  it  was  disagreeably 
accentuated. 

As  a  general  rule,  Tennyson's  afterthoughts  and 
changes,  whether  in  the  shape  of  omissions  or  addi- 
tions, are  distinct  improvements.  There  are  a  few 
exceptions,  and  here  is  one  of  the  few.  It  was  bad 
enough  so  to  portray  the  personages  of  the  story 
that  the  hero  is  completely  overshadowed  by  the 
heroine  and  one  is  almost  tempted  to  think  poorly  of 
her  for  falling  in  love  mth  him  at  all.  The  character 
of  the  Princess  was  deservedly  a  favorite  with  Tenny- 
son himself.  It  was  doubtless  intended  that  the  Prince 
should  not  come  up  to  her  height.  For  that  matter, 
as  she  is  depicted,  few  men  would.  This,  however,  can 
hardly  be  regarded  as  a  justification  for  making  the 
inferiority  of  the  hero  so  pronounced  as  it  was  even 
in  the  first  instance.  But  not  content  with  having 
impressed  upon  the  reader's  mind  at  the  outset  a  sense 
of  this  inferiority,  Tennyson  proceeded  in  the  later 
version  of  the  poem  to  make  the  inferiority  seem  even 
more  inferior  by  the  introduction  of  a  physical  defect 
which  conduced  still  further  to  his  undesirability.  To 
represent  him  as  subject  to  '' weird  seizures,"  as 
Tennyson  did  in  the  fourth  and  subsequent  editions, 


566  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

was  still  further  to  widen  the  gap  which  existed 
between  the  two  originally.  It  is  not  likely  that  the 
affliction,  which  the  court  physician  politely  murmurs 
as  catalepsy,  would  recommend  a  suitor  to  any  woman, 
least  of  all  to  one  possessed  of  so  lofty  a  nature,  both 
mental  and  physical,  as  the  Princess.  Certainly,  it 
does  not  recommend  him  to  the  reader. 

One  explanation  has  been  given  of  this  addition  to 
the  effect  that  Tennyson  himself  came  more  and  more 
to  be  sensible  of  the  inferiority  of  the  hero  to  the 
heroine.  Accordingly,  he  set  up  the  weird  seizures 
as  an  explanation  of  the  failure  of  the  Prince  to  reach 
the  height  which  the  Princess  occupies  without  effort. 
If  so,  it  was  an  unfortunate  expedient  to  which  he 
resorted;  for  the  characteristic  designed  to  palliate 
the  weakness  of  the  character  serves  only  to  aggravate 
it.  Far  more  likely  is  it  that  Tennyson  was  led  to 
introduce  these  weird  seizures  because  to  a  certain 
extent  they  were  suggested  by  peculiar  experiences 
of  his  o^vn.  From  his  boyhood  he  was  subject  to  what 
for  the  lack  of  a  better  name  he  called  waking  trances. 
A  transcript  of  these  may  be  found  in  the  ninety-fifth 
section  of  'In  Memoriam,'  and  in  the  concluding  lines 
of  'The  Holy  Grail,'  in  which  King  Arthur  gives  his 
reasons  for  not  taking  part  in  its  quest.  A  prose 
version  of  the  same  mental  phenomenon  was  furnished 
by  Tennyson  himself  in  a  letter  written  in  1874.  In 
it  he  gave  to  a  correspondent  a  feeble  description,  as 
he  said,  of  a  state  which  in  his  opinion  it  was  beyond 
the  power  of  words  to  represent  accurately.  "This," 
he  wrote,  "has  often  come  upon  me  through  repeating 


I 


THE  PRINCESS  567 

my  o^vn  name  to  myself  silently  till,  all  at  once,  as  it 
were,  out  of  the  intensity  of  the  consciousness  of 
individuality  the  individuality  itself  seemed  to  dissolve 
and  fade  away  into  boundless  being,  and  this  not  a 
confused  state,  but  the  clearest,  the  surest  of  the 
surest,  utterly  beyond  words,  where  death  was  an 
almost  laughable  impossibility,  the  loss  of  personality 
(if  so  it  were)  seeming  no  extinction,  but  only  the 
true  life."^  All  such  experience  is  proper  enough  for 
him  who  leads  a  contemplative  life.  Especially  is  it 
proper  for  a  poet.  To  a  man  of  action,  however,  such 
as  the  Prince  is  designed  to  be,  experiences  of  this  sort 
are  totally  unbefitting  in  circumstances  when  action 
is  imperatively  called  for.  As  a  consequence,  instead 
of  elevating  the  character,  they  tend  to  lower  it. 

1  Letter  of  May  7,   1874,  as  cited  in  John   Cuming  Walters 's  *  In 
Tennyson  Land,'  p,  38. 


CHAPTER  XXI 
POET  LAUREATE 

On  the  twenty-third  of  April,  1850,  Wordsworth 
died.  He  had  hardly  been  laid  in  his  grave  when 
discussion  sprang  np  as  to  who  should  succeed  him  as 
poet  laureate.  It  extended  to  the  desirability  of 
continuing  the  office.  There  were  those  who  thought 
that  it  was  high  time  that  this  post,  whose  duties  had 
now  become  nominal,  should  be  abolished.  Others  who 
were  averse  to  so  radical  a  measure  took  the  ground 
that  its  character  should  be  changed.  All  sorts  of 
propositions  indeed  were  urged  in  regard  to  the 
position.  One,  for  instance,  was  to  the  effect  that  it 
should  be  granted  for  but  a  single  year  with  the  right, 
however,  of  reappointment.  It  was  to  be  continued 
in  the  hands  of  the  same  holder  during  what  might 
be  called  good  behavior.  The  most  powerful  of  the 
London  dailies  advocated  the  abolition  of  the  title 
altogether.^  It  had  become,  it  said,  nothing  but  a 
nickname.  The  emoluments  connected  with  the  office 
should  be  bestowed  upon  a  deserving  man  of  letters 
without  the  ridiculous  accompaniment  of  the  bays. 
"The  title,"  it  continued,  ''is  no  longer  an  honour." 
The  phrase  "no  longer"  presents  a  certain  difficulty 
to  the  student  of  literary  history.    He  would  be  some- 

1' Times,'  April  25,  1850. 


1 


POET  LAUREATE  569 

what  at  a  loss  to  discover  any  prolonged  period  in  the 
past  when  it  was  regarded  as  an  honor  by  any  one  else 
than  the  actual  holder.  It  required,  the  writer  added, 
the  reputation  of  a  Southey  or  a  "Wordsworth  to  carry 
them  without  injury  to  their  fame  through  an  office 
so  entirely  removed  from  the  ideas  and  habits  of  the 
present  time,  and  which  in  the  past  had  been  frequently 
rendered  disreputable  both  by  the  character  and  the 
abilities  of  its  holder. 

Almost  from  the  beginning,  indeed,  the  office  of  poet 
laureate  had  had  a  good  deal  of  the  time  a  fairly  fatal 
tendency  to  fall  into  contempt.  As  long  as  one  of  its 
duties  was  the  production  of  odes  for  set  occasions, 
this  was  inevitable;  for  poetry  produced  to  order  is 
in  general  one  of  the  most  deplorable  results  of  human 
incapacity.  But  the  degradation  of  the  office  had  been 
mainly  due  to  its  having  been  conferred  as  a  reward 
for  party  allegiance  or  political  service.  After  Dryden 
had  been  deprived  of  the  position,  it  was  held  by  a 
succession  of  poetical  nonentities  from  the  days  of 
Shadwell  to  those  of  Pye,  the  poorness  of  which  is 
little  relieved  by  the  names  of  Rowe  and  Warton. 
Hence  the  most  eminent  men  were  unfiling  to  accept 
it.  Gray  refused  it;  so  did  Walter  Scott.  Southey 
was  willing  to  take  it,  for  he  thought  himself  as  being 
on  the  whole  the  greatest  poet  of  his  generation,  and 
accordingly  the  office  was  a  legitimate  tribute  to  his 
eminence.  He  could  not  bring  to  the  position  great 
poetic  ability;  but  he  could  and  did  bring  it  respecta- 
bility. His  successor,  Wordsworth,  conferred  upon  it 
reputation.      Consequently,    when    he    died,    no    one 


570  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

seemed  to  the  men  of  that  day  fitted  to  take  his  place. 
Hence  arose  the  demand  for  the  abolition  of  the  office 
altogether  or  a  complete  change  in  its  character. 

Even  before  Wordsworth  died,  there  had  been 
occasional  talk  as  to  the  one  likely  to  be  chosen  as  his 
successor.  Some  of  the  names  suggested — then  as  well 
as  afterwards — sound  oddly  enough  now.  Writers 
were  occasionally  mentioned — and  that,  too,  by  men 
of  intelligence — whom  it  is  hard  to  conceive  as  having 
been  thought  of  by  any  rational  being.  One  of  them 
was  the  Quaker  poet,  Bernard  Barton.  To  him 
in  December,  1846,  William  Bodham  Donne  wrote 
expressing  the  opinion  that  if  the  office  became  vacant 
he  would  be  selected  for  the  position.  ''If  the  Daddy," 
he  said — Daddy  was  the  name  applied  to  Wordsworth 
by  some  of  his  younger  admirers — ''was  to  die,  I 
think  you  would  be  made  laureate. ' '  As  the  death  of 
Barton  took  place  before  that  of  the  holder  of  the 
office,  his  name  necessarily  did  not  come  up  for  consid- 
eration ;  but  his  chances  for  receiving  the  position  were 
precisely  the  same  after  that  event  as  they  would  have 
been  before  it.  Another  poet  thought  of  by  some, 
especially  those  of  the  older  generation,  was  Henry 
Taylor.  He  himself  informs  us  that  George  Cornwall 
Lewis,  then  a  member  of  Lord  John  Russell's  first 
administration,  meeting  him  after  the  death  of  Words- 
worth, told  him  that  he  had  suggested  to  the  prime 
minister  that  the  laureateship  should  be  offered  to  him. 
Lewis  was  surprised  to  hear  that  Tennyson  had  been 
under  consideration.  In  his  opinion  that  poet  was  but 
little  known,  and  his  claims  would  not  be  generally 


POET  LAUREATE  571 

recognized.  ''Living,"  wrote  Taylor,  "amongst  the 
men  in  London  who  were  the  most  eminent  in  litera- 
ture, he  had  yet  lived  so  far  apart  from  poetry,  that 
the  poet  who  for  some  years  past  had  eclipsed  every 
other  in  popularity  was  supposed  by  him  to  be 
obscure."  After  reading  the  account  of  this  conver- 
sation, we  hardly  need  Taylor's  further  assurance  that 
the  mind  of  Levvis  was  essentially  prosaic. 

At  the  time  itself,  indeed,  any  one  who  had  the 
slightest  claim  to  distinction  as  a  writer  of  verse  was 
fairly  sure  to  be  suggested  by  somebody.  In  certain 
cases  it  was  done  vrith  the  consent  of  the  person 
mentioned,  in  other  cases  without  it.  Even  the  name 
of  that  sorry  rhymester,  Charles  Mackay,  was  brought 
to  the  attention  of  the  public.  Mackay 's  earlier 
excursions  in  poetry  were  almost  as  wretched  as  his 
later  excursions  in  philology.  But  he  had  the  good 
fortune  to  have  certain  of  his  pieces  made  generally 
familiar  as  songs.  In  consequence  he  owed  to  the 
music  to  which  his  words  were  set  a  consideration 
which  never  could  or  would  have  been  given  to  the 
words  themselves.  He,  however,  in  all  sincerity 
believed  himself  to  be  a  poet,  and  the  success  secured 
for  his  cheap  verses  by  the  agency  of  another  art  he 
attributed  to  their  o^\ti  inherent  excellence.  The 
surprising  thing  is  that  others  were  found  at  that  time 
to  take  the  same  view.  Much  more  deserving  of 
respect  was  the  name  of  Bryan  Waller  Procter,  better 
known  as  Barry  Cornwall.  He  had  written  some  fine 
lyrics ;  but  he  was  too  well  aware  of  his  own  limitations 
to  entertain  for  a  moment  any  thought  of  his  fitness 


572  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

for  the  post.  Richard  Monckton  Milnes  and  Robert 
Browning  are  said  by  later  writers  to  have  been 
suggested  also.  This  may  very  likely  have  been  the 
case ;  though  no  mention  of  them  has  fallen  under  my 
own  observation  in  the  necessarily  limited  consultation 
of  the  periodical  literature  of  the  time. 

No  attention  whatever  was  paid  to  these  various 
proposals  by  the  authorities  in  whom  the  power  of 
appointment  existed.  The  post  was  offered  in  the 
first  place  to  Rogers.  On  the  eighth  of  May  a  letter 
was  written  to  him  by  Prince  Albert,  acting  in  behalf 
of  the  Queen,  tendering  him  the  position.^  One  gets 
the  impression  that  this  action  seems  to  have  been 
taken  not  as  a  tribute  to  his  poetic  eminence,  but 
rather  as  a  recognition  of  his  merit  in  having  lived 
so  long.  One  of  the  most  perplexing  questions  with 
which  the  modern  student  of  literature  has  to  deal  is 
the  vogue  which  Rogers  early  attained  as  a  poet  and 
more  or  less  retained  during  the  whole  of  his  long  life. 
His  '  Pleasures  of  Memory, '  upon  which  his  reputation 
mainly  rests,  is  one  of  the  pleasures  in  which  readers 
of  to-day  rarely  indulge.  The  acquisition  of  its 
original  repute  is  not  so  hard  to  understand.  It  came 
out  in  the  interval  between  the  decadence  of  the 
eighteenth-century  poetical  school  and  the  great  out- 
burst of  song  which  marked  the  very  close  of  the 
eighteenth  century  and  the  first  quarter  of  the  nine- 
teenth. The  work  originally  appeared  in  1792.  Before 
the  seventh  year  after  its  publication  had  been 
reached,  it  had  gone  through  six  editions.     It  was 

1  p.  W.  Clayden  's  '  Eogers  and  his  Contemporaries, '  Vol.  II,  p.  352. 


POET  LAUREATE  573 

reprinted  again  and  again  during  the  first  half  of  the 
nineteenth  century.     The   succeeding  productions   of 
Rogers  met  with  a  respectable  degree  of  favor.    None 
of  them,  however,  rivalled  in  popularity  'The  Pleas- 
ures   of   Memory.'     But   the    glamour   of   his    early 
achievement  still  continued  to  hang  about  the  poet  and 
gave  a  sort  of  fictitious  repute  to  whatever  he  later 
published.     Though  his  best  work  was  far  surpassed 
by  many   of   his   contemporaries,   the   general   voice 
nevertheless  accorded  him  a  high  position  in  the  ranks 
of  the  poetical  fraternity.    Nor  was  the  lofty  opinion 
entertained  of  him  the  opinion  of  men  intellectually 
inferior.    As  late  as  1830,  Macaulay  could  not  refrain 
from   expressing  his   surprise   at   the   estimation   in 
which  Rogers  was  held,  agreeable  enough  as  he  consid- 
ered his  writings  to  be.    ''That  such  men,"  he  wrote, 
''as  Lord  Granville,  Lord  Holland,  Hobhouse,  Lord 
Byron,  and  others  of  high  rank  in  intellect,  should 
place  Rogers,  as  they  do,  above  Southey,  Moore  and 
even  Scott  himself,  is  what  I  can  not  conceive.     But 
this  comes  of  being  in  the  highest  society  of  London. 
What  Lady  Jane  Granville  called  the  Patronage  of 
Fashion  can  do  as  much  for  a  middling  poet  as  for  a 
plain  girl  like  Miss  Arabella  Falconer.'" 

There  were  other  causes,  however,  which  contributed 
to  the  maintenance  of  the  reputation  of  Rogers.  Some 
of  the  good  opinion  entertained  of  him  was  due  to  the 
generosity  displayed  by  him  towards  his  less  fortunate 
literary  brothers.    His  hand  and  tongue  were  always 

1  Macaulay 's  'Life  and  Letters,'  Vol.  I,  p.  198,  Letter  of  June  3, 
1831. 


574  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

at  war.  He  had  a  habit  of  saying  about  contemporary 
men  of  letters  sharp  and  at  times  bitter  things.  He 
rarely  failed  to  comment  upon  their  defects  of  nature 
or  of  intellect.  But  in  the  times  of  their  distress  and 
pecuniary  trouble  he  was  fairly  sure  to  come  to  their 
relief.  His  aid  too  was  always  given  unostentatiously 
and  as  a  general  rule  secretly.  Tested  by  his  utter- 
ances he  would  often  appear  one  of  the  most  unamiable 
not  to  say  malicious  of  men.  Measured  by  his  deeds 
he  was  one  of  the  kindest  and  most  generous.  This 
naturally  led  many  of  his  literary  friends  to  take  a 
peculiarly  favorable  view  of  what  he  had  accomplished. 
Other  circumstances  there  were  which  contributed  to 
this  result  besides  the  reason  suggested  by  Macaulay. 
At  Rogers's  house  were  to  be  met  the  men  most 
brilliant  in  the  literary  and  intellectual  world.  It  was 
an  honor  for  any  young  aspirant  for  distinction  in 
letters  to  be  invited  to  sit  at  his  table.  It  was  not  for 
the  guest  at  such  a  gathering  to  indulge  in  deprecia- 
tory, still  less  sarcastic,  comments  upon  the  poetry  of 
his  host.  Much  rather  was  he  disposed  to  accord  him 
all  the  praise  his  conscience  would  permit  him  to  utter. 
It  was  indeed  inevitable  that  the  man  of  letters  just 
setting  forth  upon  his  career  should  be  grateful  for 
the  privilege  of  sitting  down  at  a  table  where  he  was 
surrounded  on  every  side  by  those  who  had  already 
attained  reputation.  It  was  equally  inevitable  that 
he  should  contribute  to  any  periodical  with  which  he 
chanced  to  be  connected  a  more  or  less  flattering 
opinion  of  the  poet  and  his  work.    He  would  certainly 


POET  LAUREATE  575 

have  no  disposition  to  expose  faults  and  imperfections 
even  if  he  saw  them  plainly. 

The  laureateship  indeed  seemed  almost  a  perquisite 
of  the  literary  position  to  which  Rogers  had  now 
attained.  That  it  should  be  offered  him  partook 
almost  of  the  nature  of  necessity.  No  one  seems  any- 
where to  have  entered  an  objection.  It  is  a  tribute 
to  his  owTi  good  sense  that  he  declined  it.  Even  in 
the  most  extreme  self -estimate  he  took  of  himself,  the 
contrast  between  his  o^vn  work  and  that  of  Words- 
worth must  have  been  apparent.  What  he  saw  so  well, 
he  knew  that  others  would  fancy  that  they  could  see 
better.  The  position  afforded  tempting  opportunities 
for  sarcasm  and  detraction.  He  could  feel  assured 
that  there  were  those  who  would  only  be  too  glad  to 
avail  themselves  of  them.  Furthermore,  he  was  now 
eighty-seven  years  old.  This  gave  him  a  justifiable 
reason  for  declining  an  honor  to  which  in  his  secret 
heart  he  must  have  felt  himself  in  no  wise  entitled. 
Accordingly  he  pleaded  the  excuse  of  age.  It  seems 
to  have  been  willingly  accepted.  By  the  offer  itself 
due  respect  had  been  paid  to  the  oldest  survivor  of 
the  Georgian  era.  The  filling  of  the  office  remained 
in  consequence  in  abeyance  and  the  claims  of  the 
various  candidates  for  the  position  continued  to  be 
warmly  pressed,  and  their  qualifications  as  warmly 
discussed. 

Before  the  place  had  been  offered  to  Rogers  and 
declined,  there  were  several  other  poets,  as  has  been 
said,  who  had  been  suggested  as  worthy  to  hold  the 
office.    Of  some  the  claims  were  earnestly  pushed  either 


576  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

by  themselves  or  by  their  friends.  One  of  these  men 
was  Leigh  Hunt.  He  had  a  very  respectable  band  of 
supporters,  nor  did  he  himself  pretend  to  disguise  his 
desire  for  the  honor.  In  the  early  part  of  June,  1850, 
appeared  his  autobiography.  The  discussion  of  the 
one  who  was  to  be  or  ought  to  be  the  future  poet 
laureate  was  then  going  on  vigorously  in  the  press. 
Towards  the  conclusion  of  the  work.  Hunt  took  up 
the  consideration  of  his  own  claims  to  the  position 
and  hinted  unmistakably  that  he  would  not  be  averse 
to  accepting  it,  were  it  offered.  He  considered  dis- 
passionately the  arguments  that  could  be  brought  in 
his  favor  and  those  that  might  militate  against  the 
bestowal  upon  him  of  an  office  of  that  character.  On 
the  one  hand,  he  had  been  in  the  past  a  sort  of  volunteer 
laureate.  He  had  celebrated  in  verse  her  Majesty's 
birthday  and  also  the  birthdays  of  the  royal  children. 
To  his  admiration  for  the  Queen  and  to  the  natural 
loyalty  he  felt  for  a  female  sovereign  were  to  be 
attributed  those  effusions  of  gratitude  which  had  been 
thought  by  some  to  give  him  a  claim  to  the  post.  Any 
such  view  he  disavowed,  for,  as  he  observed,  gratitude 
makes  no  claim. 

On  the  other  hand,  conditions  might  be  required 
which  it  was  impossible  for  him  to  meet.  '*!  do  not 
mean  with  regard  to  poetical  qualifications,"  he  said; 
**for  without  entering  into  comparison  of  myself  with 
others,  which  neither  my  modesty  nor  my  pride  will 
allow,  it  would  be  an  affectation  and  a  falsehood  in 
me  to  pretend  that  I  do  not  hold  myself  to  possess 
them.     I  venture  even  to  think,  and  this  too,  without 


POET  LAUREATE  577 

any  disparagement  to  court  taste,  that  I  should  make 
a  better  court  poet  than  some  who  are  superior  to  me 
in  respects  not  courtly.  And  sure  I  am,  that  in  one 
respect  I  should  make  a  very  rare  poet,  as  far  as  the 
world  has  hitherto  seen;  for  I  should  write  from  the 
heart.  I  have  done  so  already. ' '  Then  he  went  on  to 
discuss  the  political  and  religious  objections  which 
might  be  brought  against  conferring  the  office  upon  a 
man  holding  the  opinions  he  did.  His  conclusion  was 
that  if  these  opinions  had  nothing  to  do  with  the  post, 
he  should  rejoice  to  be  thought  worthy  of  it.  It  is 
manifest  indeed  from  his  remarks  that  Hunt  con- 
sidered himself  the  poetical  equal  of  any  person  who 
had  been  named  for  the  position.  This  desire  for  it 
too  must  have  been  expressed  elsewhere  than  in  this 
autobiography.  There  is  a  reference  to  the  fact  in 
a  letter  from  Mrs.  Browning  to  Miss  Mitford.  It  was 
written  from  Florence  and  dated  the  fifteenth  of  June. 
By  that  time  the  work  containing  the  sentiments  just 
quoted  could  hardly  have  reached  Italy.  "I  think," 
Mrs.  Browning  expressed  herself,  '*  Leigh  Hunt  should 
have  the  Laureateship.  He  has  condescended  to  wish 
for  it,  and  he  has  'worn  his  singing  clothes'  longer 
than  most  of  his  contemporaries,  deserving  the  price 
of  long  as  well  as  noble  service."^ 

Not  so,  however,  thought  many  others.  Among 
those  who  took  a  very  conspicuous  part  in  the  discus- 
sion of  the  appointment  was  Henry  Fothergill  Chorley. 
He  was  at  that  time  musical  editor  of  'The  Athenaeum' 
and  was  further  responsible  for  many  of  its  criticisms 

1 '  Letters  of  Mrs.  Browning, '  Vol.  I,  p.  452. 


578  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

of  books.  He  was  in  many  ways  a  man  of  fair,  though 
of  far  from  commanding  ability.  He  had  led  a  some- 
what checkered  literary  career.  He  had  written  novels 
which  had  not  succeeded,  he  had  written  plays  which 
had  not  succeeded,  he  had  written  poetry  which  had 
not  succeeded.  Accordingly  he  may  be  said  to  have 
answered  fully  to  that  ancient  ill-natured  description 
of  the  reviewing  fraternity  which  Disraeli  was  the  last 
to  formulate  in  a  condensed  form,  that  a  critic  is  one 
who  has  failed  in  literature  and  art.  In  regard  to  this 
particular  matter  under  discussion,  Chorley  had  one 
set  idea  in  his  mind.  A  woman  was  on  the  throne. 
If  the  laureateship  was  to  be  retained,  the  proper 
person  to  fill  it  was  a  woman,  provided  one  sufficiently 
worthy  were  found.  Such  a  one  did  exist.  She  was 
Elizabeth  Barrett  Browning.  Her  he  had  had  in  his 
eye  from  the  outset.  In  the  number  of  ' The  Athenaeum' 
for  June  1,  he  announced  that  as  yet  there  had  been 
no  decision  as  to  the  holder  of  the  post.  Now  for  the 
first  time  he  indicated  his  own  choice  in  unmistakable 
terms. 

Chorley  was  not  the  only  one  who  took  the  position 
that  since  the  throne  was  occupied  by  a  woman,  it  was 
peculiarly  fitting  that  the  laureateship  should  be  held 
by  a  woman.  There  was  a  widespread  feeling  that 
such  action  would  be  a  graceful  tribute  to  the  Queen 
herself.  Unfortunately  for  its  advocates,  she  herself 
manifestly  did  not  share  in  the  sentiment.  More  than 
one  female  name  was  mentioned  as  worthy  to  fill  the 
post.  A  reviewer,  for  instance,  while  urging  in  an 
influential  periodical  that  the  office  should  not  be  given 


POET  LAUREATE  579 

up,  expressed  a  preference  for  the  selection  of  a 
particular  woman  as  its  holder.  ''Had  we  a  voice  on 
the  subject,"  he  wrote,  "we  should  ^Yish.  that,  in 
memory  of  the  illustrious  dead,  and  in  the  feeling  of 
gratitude  to  one  of  the  most  graceful  writers  li\'ing, 
the  laurel  were  bestowed  on  the  wife  of  Southey,  as 
the  writer  whom  we  have  all  known  and  all  admired 
as  Caroline  Bowles."^  But  such  nominations  for  the 
post  were  merely  expressions  of  individual  preference. 
As  at  this  time  Mrs.  BroA\Tiing  stood  at  the  head  of 
all  the  poetesses  of  her  country  in  popular  estimation, 
her  name  was  the  one  almost  invariably  mentioned, 
when  a  woman  was  mentioned  as  the  proper  one  to 
hold  the  position.  ' '  In  the  reign  of  a  youthful  queen, ' ' 
wrote  Chorley,  ''if  there  be  among  her  subjects  one 
of  her  own  sex  whom  the  laurel  ^\t.11  fit,  its  grant  to  a 
female  would  be  at  once  an  honourable  testimonial  to 
the  indi\T.dual,  a  fitting  recognition  of  the  remarkable 
place  which  the  women  of  England  have  taken  in  the 
literature  of  the  day,  and  a  graceful  compliment  to  the 
Sovereign  herself.  It  happens  to  fall  in  well  with  this 
view  of  the  case  that  there  is  no  living  poet  of  either 
sex  who  can  prefer  a  higher  claim  than  Mrs.  Elizabeth 
Barrett  Bro\^^ling."  It  is  clear  that  the  Queen,  if 
she  thought  of  the  matter  at  all,  was  not  in  the  least 
impressed  by  the  desirability  of  appointing  a  woman 
to  the  office  because  she  herself  was  a  woman.  She 
could  not  help  being  aware  that  so  far  as  any  glory 
would  redound  to  her  reign  from  the  selection,  it  would 
come  from  the  genius  and  not  the  sex  of  the  holder. 

1' North  British  Eeview,'  November,  1850,  Vol.  XIV,  p.  167. 


580  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

It  is  a  singular  illustration  of  the  state  of  contem- 
porary opinion  that  while  Mrs.  Browning's  name  was 
prominently  mentioned  for  the  post  of  laureate,  that 
of  her  husband  seems  hardly  to  have  been  thought  of, 
though  during  the  fifth  decade  of  the  century  he  had 
published  his  series  of  'Bells  and  Pomegranates'  con- 
taining some  of  his  finest  work.  If  he  was  mentioned 
at  all,  it  could  hardly  have  been  in  any  quarter  which 
carried  weight  with  the  public.  Mrs.  Browning  was 
doubtless  grateful  to  Chorley  for  his  championship  of 
her  claims,  though  at  heart  she  was  probably  amused 
by  it.  She  manifestly  never  entertained  the  slightest 
expectation  of  being  named  for  the  post ;  for  her  good 
sense  never  failed  her,  save  in  continuing  to  retain 
affection  for  her  despicable  brute  of  a  father.  Never- 
theless her  advocate  persisted  in  vigorously  urging 
her  selection.  But  after  the  declination  by  Rogers, 
Leigh  Hunt  and  Tennyson  were  the  two  poets  who 
were  the  most  prominent  as  candidates  in  the  eyes  of 
the  general  public.  In  regard  to  them  Chorley  assumed 
an  almost  aggressive  attitude.  In  a  way  which  now 
seems  amusing,  but  must  then  have  seemed  presump- 
tuous, he  solemnly  warned  off  both  of  them  from 
aspiring  to  the  position.  It  did  not  please  him  at  all 
that  Leigh  Hunt  should  let  it  be  known  that  he  would 
be  gratified  to  receive  the  appointment.  No  charge  of 
that  sort  indeed  could  be  brought  against  Tennyson. 
Neither  directly  nor  indirectly  did  he  make  the 
slightest  effort  to  push  his  pretensions,  nor  did  he 
indicate  in  any  way  his  desire  for  the  office. 

Still,  Tennyson's  poetical  position  had  now  become 


POET  LAUREATE  581 

so  assured  that  it  was  inevitable  that  his  claims  should 
come  up  for  consideration.  As  we  have  seen,  his  name 
had  been  proposed  for  the  post  on  the  death  of  Southey 
in  1843.  That  it  should  then  have  been  suggested  at 
all  was  evidence  of  the  growth  of  his  reputation;  for 
any  mention  of  him  as  a  candidate  for  the  position 
would  have  been  hardly  possible  before  the  publication 
of  the  volumes  of  1842.  Even  at  that  late  day  enough 
of  the  old  prejudice  against  Wordsworth  had  still 
survived  to  provoke  dissent  at  his  selection,  though 
it  was  in  general  little  audible.  But  if  objection  could 
be  raised  against  the  one  man  who  had  come  to  be 
generally  reckoned  the  first  of  li\dng  English  poets, 
we  need  not  be  told  what  an  outbreak  of  protest  there 
would  have  been  had  the  choice  then  fallen  upon  him 
who  in  the  eyes  of  many  was  little  more  than  the  chief 
of  a  poetic  school,  and  furthermore  of  a  school  for 
which  they  had  no  admiration,  even  if  they  did  not 
entertain  for  it  distinct  aversion.  But  by  the  year 
1850,  the  sentiments  of  the  cultivated  public  had  under- 
gone a  complete  revolution.  Tennyson  had  now  come 
to  stand  in  its  eyes  as  the  recognized  head  of  the  poets 
of  his  own  generation.  There  was  in  consequence  a 
widespread  sentiment  that  if  the  post  were  to  be 
conferred  upon  the  ground  of  desert,  he  was  the  one 
upon  whom  the  choice  should  fall. 

But  such  were  far  from  being  Chorley's  sentiments. 
In  the  columns  of  the  weekly  literary  paper  with  which 
he  was  connected  he  gave  again  and  again  expression 
of  his  hostility  towards  any  action  of  this  sort.  A  few 
days  after  "Wordsworth's  death  he  observed  that  he 


582  LIFE  AND  TIIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

had  been  given  to  understand  that  the  laureateship 
was  likely  to  fall  to  the  lot  of  Tennyson.  Against  any 
such  action  he  protested  earnestly.  He  declared  he 
could  not  believe  the  report  to  be  true.  Tennyson's 
poetical  claims  had  been  already  rewarded  with  a 
pension  of  three  hundred  pounds  a  year.  To  give  him 
further  one  of  the  few  pecuniary  provisions  set  apart 
for  men  of  letters  would  be  a  great  wrong  inflicted 
upon  his  brethren  and  ''not  justified  by  the  pre- 
eminence of  his  desert.'"  It  is  manifest  from  the 
critic 's  subsequent  utterances  that  he  was  not  thinking 
so  much  of  the  poet's  literary  brothers  as  of  his 
literary  sisters.  In  the  following  week  he  corrected 
his  mistake  as  to  the  amount  of  the  poet's  pension; 
but  he  insisted  that  this  slip  left  entirely  unaffected 
the  objection  to  what  he  called  the  accumulation  of 
literary  benefices  in  a  single  person.^  It  is  evident 
from  Chorley's  various  utterances  that  in  his  opinion 
offices  of  this  sort  should  be  divided  round.  The 
eminence  of  the  poet,  due  to  the  worthiness  of  his 
work,  should  not  be  the  main  consideration  in  granting 
this  particular  prize  from  the  public  treasury.  ' '  There 
is  more  than  one  worthy  recipient  of  the  laurel,"  he 
remarked,  — ' '  and  more  than  one,  unhappily,  the  state 
of  whose  fortunes  makes  it  needful  that  the  leaves 
should  be  gilded."  According  to  this  view,  the 
laureateship  was  not  to  be  offered  to  him  most  fitted 
by  his  genius  to  hold  it,  but  to  be  treated  as  one  of  the 

1  *  Athenaeum, '  April  27,  p.  451. 

2  Ibid.,  May  4,  p.  477. 


POET  LAUREATE  583 

offices  to  be  distributed  among  the  deserving  who  had 
the  additional  recommendation  of  being  poor. 

This  ^dew  led  him  later  to  inveigh  more  than  once 
against  the  selection  of  Leigh  Hunt.  He  became 
excited  when  later  the  rumor  reached  his  ears  that 
this  particular  author  was  to  receive  the  laurel. 
Accordingly  he  now  proceeded  to  speak  much  more 
strongly  than  before.  He  observed  that  many  of  his 
contemporaries  had  urged  this  appointment.  '^We 
hope,"  he  said,  ''no  such  injustice,  in  all  senses  of  the 
word,  will  be  committed."  The  references  he  made 
to  his  candidacy  were  far  from  complimentary.  His 
views  as  to  Hunt's  poetical  position  varied  widely 
from  those  entertained  by  Hunt  himself.  If  ability 
in  that  particular  were  to  be  regarded  as  the  only 
consideration,  his  claims  were  far  below  those  of 
Tennyson.  If  the  latter  was  ruled  out  by  the  fact  of 
his  ha^T.ng  received  a  pension,  much  more  would  the 
former,  who,  in  addition  to  his  having  received  one, 
was  distinctly  inferior  as  a  poet  to  his  contemporary. 
To  give  the  laureateship  to  him  would  be  to  prostitute 
the  office  ''and  to  do  great  wrong  to  yet  unpensioned 
genius  which  may  need  the  profit  that  is  legitimately 
its  due."  Once  more  he  returned  to  the  advocacy  of 
the  claims  of  the  poetess  whom  he  had  already  desig- 
nated as  the  one  upon  whom  the  choice  ought  to  fall. 
By  conferring  the  position  on  Mrs.  Browning,  a  grace- 
ful compliment  would  be  paid  to  the  youthful  sovereign 
in  thus  recognizing  the  remarkable  literary  place  taken 
by  women  in  her  reign.  Then  followed  the  only 
instance  which  has  come  under  my  observation — doubt- 


584  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

less  there  were  others — of  the  fact  that  Browning 
himself  was  looked  upon  as  a  poet  by  any  one  of  those 
who  took  part  in  the  discussion.  ' '  This  appropriation 
of  the  laurel,"  Chorley  remarked,  ''has  another  argu- 
ment in  its  favour : — it  would  in  a  manner  recompense 
two  poets  by  a  single  act. '  '^ 

But  while  controversy  on  the  subject  was  still  going 
on,  'In  Memoriam'  was  published.  Tennyson's  pros- 
pects for  the  gift  of  the  laurel  had  been  bright  before, 
so  far  as  that  depended  on  the  favor  of  the  public. 
Still  they  could  hardly  be  called  certain.  The  appear- 
ance, however,  of  this  work  changed  at  once  the  whole 
situation.  It  made  his  superiority  to  any  possible 
aspirant  so  manifest  that  tlie  claims  of  all  others  were 
cast  utterly  in  the  shade  by  comparison  with  those 
of  the  poet,  who,  by  this  last  poem  had  established 
himself  firmly  in  the  regard  of  the  English-speaking 
people  every^vhere.  With  the  passing  of  every  week, 
the  recognition  of  his  pre-eminence  became  more 
significantly  notable  and  noticeable.  In  the  eyes  of 
the  cultivated  classes  he  was  the  one  marked  out  to  be 
the  coming  wearer  of  the  laurel.  The  public  voice  was 
heeded  by  the  court.  In  truth,  it  was  doubtless  the 
same  as  its  ovro.  voice.  On  the  third  of  October,  a 
letter  of  inquiry  about  Tennyson  was  addressed  by 
Lord  John  Russell  to  Rogers.  Its  purport  was  not 
to  ask  about  Tennj'"son's  poetical  fitness,  but  to  gain 
some  knowledge  of  his  personal  character.  The  prime 
minister  was  in  this  instance  acting  as  the  mouthpiece 
of  the  Queen.     He  expressly  said  that  her  Majesty 

1 '  Athenaeum, '  June  22,  p.  662. 


POET  LAUREATE  585 

was  inclined  to  bestow  the  office  on  Mr.  Tennyson/ 
According  to  the  statement  made  in  the  authorized  life 
of  the  poet,  his  selection  for  the  post  was  chiefly  due 
to  the  admiration  of  Prince  Albert  for  *  In  Memoriam. ' 
How  the  result  was  actually  reached — whether  the 
Queen  influenced  the  Prince  Consort  or  the  Prince 
Consort  influenced  the  Queen,  or  whether  both  came 
independently  to  the  same  conclusion — may  never  be 
definitely  known.  What  is  certain  is,  that  the  opinion 
of  the  two  highest  persons  in  the  state  accorded  with 
that  of  the  public. 

Tennyson  himself  had  not  made  the  slightest  effort, 
either  by  word  or  act,  to  secure  the  position  or  even 
to  indicate  the  least  desire  for  it.  Still  he  could  hardly 
have  been  ignorant  that  his  name  had  been  very 
frequently  mentioned  in  connection  with  the  post.  A 
singular  story  is  told  that  the  night  before  he  received 
the  notice  of  the  intended  appointment — which  was 
that  of  November  4 — he  dreamt  that  Prince  Albert 
came  and  kissed  him  on  the  cheek  and  that  his  comment 
to  himself  on  the  act  was  ''Very  kind  but  very 
German."-  On  the  following  morning  the  official 
notice  reached  him  from  Windsor  Castle  that  the 
position  had  been  offered  to  him  as  a  mark  of  her 
Majesty's  appreciation  of  his  literary  distinction,  and 
as  an  indication  of  her  desire  that  the  name  of  the  poet 
appointed  should  adorn  the  office.  The  disbeliever  in 
divination  by  dreams  may  well  believe  that  rumor  at 
least  of  the  Prince's  desire  that  the  post  should  be 

1  p.  W.  Clayden  's  '  Rogers  and  his  Contemporaries, '  Vol.  II,  p.  354. 

2  '  Memoir, '  Vol.  I,  p.  335. 


586  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

conferred  upon  him  had  somehow  come  to  the  ears 
of  the  poet.  Tennyson  took  a  day  to  consider  the  offer, 
and  on  his  announcement  of  his  acceptance  the  appoint- 
ment was  made  on  the  nineteenth  of  November. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  there  was  a  substantial 
agreement  among  the  members  of  the  cultivated 
classes  that  the  choice  was  not  only  the  best  but  the 
only  appropriate  one  that  could  have  been  made. 
Naturally  there  was  dissatisfaction  on  the  part  of 
some.  There  was  ignorance  to  be  encountered,  there 
was  env>^,  there  was  jealousy.  All  this  was  inevitable. 
But  the  dissatisfied  were  so  comparatively  few  in 
number  and  as  a  general  rule  so  insignificant  in 
consideration  that  their  dissent  tended  rather  to  excite 
pity  for  their  literary  taste  than  indignation  at  their 
attitude.  Among  the  dissatisfied,  we  are  told,  were 
some  of  the  relatives  of  the  dead  laureate.  They 
waxed  exceedingly  indignant  at  the  choice  made  of 
his  successor,  though  it  is  hard  to  see  that  it  was  any 
concern  of  theirs.  They  forgot,  too,  how  unfavorably 
the  appointment  of  Wordsworth  himself  had  been 
looked  on  in  various  quarters.  But  there  is  no  question 
that  the  selection  of  Tennyson  met  general  approval 
and  in  particular  the  approval  of  what  may  be  called 
Young  England. 

But  one  person  there  was  who  was  very  far  from 
being  satisfied.  Nor  could  he  be  consoled.  This  man 
was  Chorley.  He  always  had  taken  himself  seriously; 
and  it  was  hard  for  him  to  conceal  the  indignation  he 
felt  that  the  one  he  had  fixed  upon  as  the  recipient 
of  the  laurel  had  not  been  appointed — had  apparently 


POET  LAUREATE  587 

not  even  been  considered.  He  gave  at  once  a  most 
amusing  exliibition  of  the  wrath  he  felt  for  the  little 
deference  which  had  been  paid  to  his  \^ews,  and 
incidentally  revealed  the  high  importance  he  attached 
to  his  own  position  as  a  critic,  accompanied  though 
it  was  with  a  not  unfrequent  manifestation  of  critical 
incompetence.  ''The  office  of  Laureate,"  he  wrote, 
''after  having  been  allowed  to  remain  vacant  so  long, 
has  been  finallj^  filled  up  according  to  that  spirit  of 
caprice  which  presides  ordinarily  over  Lord  John 
Eussell's  bestowal  of  the  national  gifts.  The  laurel 
has  been  given  to  Mr.  Tennyson.  We  have  already 
said,  by  anticipation,  that,  against  this  appropriation 
as  regards  Mr.  Tennyson's  fitness  to  wear  it  we  have 
not  a  word  to  say.  Poetically  speaking,  it  has  been 
often  worse  bestowed : — and,  in  fact,  Mr.  Tennyson  is 
expressly  one  of  those  legitimately  designated  for  the 
honour.  But  so  long  as  there  are  others  on  whose 
brows  it  would  have  been  as  fitly  placed — and  so  long 
as  the  nation  has  few  literary  crowns  to  give  away, — 
we  hold  that  the  multiplication  of  its  benefices  to  a 
single  subject  is  in  so  far  an  abuse  of  the  patronage 
which  the  Minister  exercises  in  the  name  of  the 
country.  Mr.  Tennyson  has  already  had  his  unques- 
tionably high  title  recognized  in  the  form  of  a  pension ; 
and  there  are  others  the  laurel  on  whose  forehead 
might  as  fitly  have  received  the  Court  stamp, — which 
happens  to  have  a  money  value  as  all  its  worth. ' ' 

Poor  Lord  John  Russell,  the  prime  minister,  had  in 
all  probability  as  little  directly  to  do  with  the  selection 
of  the  poet  laureate  as  Chorley  himself.     But  when 


588  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

we  consider  the  names  of  those  who  have  filled  the 
post,  it  is  hard  to  refrain  from  paying  a  tribute  of 
deference  to  the  ignorance  or  impudence  of  the  critic — 
it  is  impossible  to  tell  which  was  the  predominating 
influence — in  his  remark  that  poetically  speaking  the 
office  had  been  worse  bestowed.  Chorley  returned  to 
his  idea  that  the  offices  in  the  gift  of  the  Crown  should 
be  doled  out,  not  so  much  according  to  the  exceeding 
merit  of  the  recipients  as  to  their  real  or  imagined 
need  of  money.  This  he  brought  out  again  in  his  final 
lamentation  over  the  failure  to  bestow  the  laurel  upon 
Mrs.  Browning.  ''In  particular,"  he  said  further, 
**the  opportunity  has  been  lost  of  doing  an  act  which, 
while  it  would  have  been  equally  one  of  justice  with 
any  other  appropriation  of  the  office  that  could  be 
named,  would,  as  we  have  before  pointed  out,  have 
had  a  peculiar  grace  and  significance  in  the  reign  of 
a  youthful  Queen, — over  a  people,  so  striking  a  portion 
of  whose  literary  force  is  for  the  moment  constituted 
by  women.  This,  however,  we  presume,  was  too 
chivalrous  a  view  of  the  subject  for  the  Minister, — 
who  has  a  trick  of  looking  for  his  favourites  down  the 
back  stairs."^  Exactly  what  meaning  he  meant  to 
convey  by  the  phrase  "looking  down  the  back  stairs" 
is  not  clear  to  the  modern  reader.  The  most  intent 
gaze  in  that  direction  would  not  have  revealed  the 
presence  of  Tennyson,  who  had  held  himself  absolutely 
aloof  from  the  slightest  effort  to  press  his  claim  for 
the  position. 

1 '  Athenaeum, '  November  23,  1850,  p.  1218. 


CHAPTER  XXII 
ARTHUR  HENRY  HALLAM 

The  year  1850  was  a  peculiarly  eventful  one  in 
Tennyson's  life.  In  the  early  half  of  it  he  was 
married ;  in  the  latter  half  he  was  made  poet  laureate. 
But  as  regards  the  growth  of  his  reputation  and  his 
acceptance  by  the  world  of  readers,  a  still  more 
important  event  had  occurred.  This  was  the  publi- 
cation of  *In  Memoriam.'  About  two  weeks  before 
his  marriage,  appeared  this  collection  of  poems.  It 
gave  its  author  at  once  a  place  in  the  regard  of  his 
countrymen  from  which  the  most  malignant  assaults 
of  his  depredators  have  never  succeeded  in  dislodging 
him. 

Before  entering  upon  an  account  of  *In  Memoriam,' 
it  is  desirable  to  give  in  detail  certain  facts — many  of 
which  are  well  known,  but  some  of  which  have  never 
been  recorded — in  the  life  of  the  man  who  was 
its  subject.  Arthur  Henry  Hallam  was  the  eldest 
son  of  the  historian,  Henry  Hallam.  He  was  born 
February  1,  1811.  His  preliminary  education  was  at 
Eton,  which  he  entered  in  1822  and  left  in  1827.  There 
he  made  the  acquaintance  of  Gladstone.  The  two 
became  the  closest  of  friends  and  companions.  Boys 
at  that  school  regularly  breakfasted  alone  in  their 
rooms;  these   two   usually  took  that  meal  together, 


590  LIFE  AND  TBIES  OF  TENNYSON 

either  in  the  apartments  of  the  one  or  of  the  other. 
They  walked  together,  they  talked  together.  They 
reached  indeed  what  may  be  called  the  height  of  school- 
boy friendship  by  corresponding  in  vacation.  The 
intimacy  is  the  more  remarkable,  because  the  future 
statesman  was  then  a  conservative  of  the  conserva- 
tives, while  the  son  of  the  Whig  historian  was 
naturally  a  liberal — though  neither  of  these  desig- 
nations had  become  at  that  time  a  part  of  political 
nomenclature.  They  discussed  questions  of  church 
and  state,  in  which  naturally  their  opinions  conflicted. 
In  his  journal  of  May  14,  1826,  Gladstone  records 
''Stiff  arguments  with  Hallam,  as  usual  on  Sundays, 
about  articles,  creeds,  etc."  In  his  later  years  the 
statesman  came  to  believe  that  his  friend  was  right 
in  his  views  and  that  he  himself  was  wrong.  Still,  at 
the  time  itself  their  religious  and  political  differences 
did  not  stand  in  the  slightest  in  the  way  of  their 
thorough  comradeship.  In  truth,  they  probably  had 
the  effect  of  rendering  it  still  closer. 

According  to  Gladstone 's  testimony,  Hallam  at  Eton 
was  ''the  best  scholar  (in  any  but  the  very  narrowest 
sense)  of  the  whole  school  with  its  five  hundred 
pupils. ' '  After  leaving  it  he  accompanied  his  parents 
on  a  tour  to  the  Continent.  There  he  spent  a  year. 
Everything  was  favorable  to  proficiency  in  the  sub- 
jects, whatever  they  were,  on  which  he  had  set  his 
heart.  Those  were  not  as  now  the  days  when  rapid 
locomotion  left  comparatively  little  opportunity  for 
gaining  knowledge  at  first  hand.  Men  travelled  slowly, 
they  observed  closely.    Instead  of  gleaning  information 


ARTHUR  HENRY  HALLAM        591 

from  guide-books,  which  then  had  no  existence,  they 
had  to  resort  to  the  use  of  their  own  eyes  and  ears. 
They  naturally  did  not  cover  as  much  ground  as  now ; 
but  they  saw  much  more  of  the  fewer  things  they  saw 
and  retained  the  memory  of  them  more  vi\ddly.  Eight 
months  of  the  year  Hallam  spent  in  Italy.  To  visit 
that  country  still  continued  to  be  to  most  Englishmen 
the  summit  of  man's  travelling  ambition.  During  his 
stay  in  it,  he  devoted  himself  with  peculiar  ardor  to 
the  study  of  its  language  and  literature.  Tn  the 
tongue  itself  he  made  such  proficiency  that  certain 
sonnets  he  wrote  in  it  were,  after  careful  reading  and 
re-reading,  pronounced  by  Sir  Anthony  Panizzi  as 
''much  superior  not  only  to  what  foreigners  have 
written,  but  what  I  thought  possible  for  them  to 
produce  in  Italian." 

Hallam 's  father  was  a  graduate  of  Oxford,  but  for 
some  reason  he  preferred  to  send  his  son  to  Cambridge. 
This  course  was  possibly  taken  under  the  belief  that 
the  severe  mathematical  training  there  carried  on 
would  furnish  a  better  discipline  for  a  mind  which 
apparently  tended  in  the  elder  Hallam 's  opinion  too 
much  to  obscure  speculative  theories.  This  indeed  he 
may  be  thought  to  imply  in  the  memoir  he  wrote  of  his 
son.  In  it  he  deplored  Arthur's  indifference  to  mathe- 
matical studies.  "A  little  more  practice  in  the  strict 
logic  of  geometry,"  he  wrote,  "a  little  more  famil- 
iarity \vith  the  physical  laws  of  the  universe,  and  the 
phenomena  to  which  they  relate,  would  possibly  have 
repressed  the  tendency  to  vague  and  mystical  specu- 
lations which  he  was  too  fond  of  indulging."    At  the 


592  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

same  time,  while  this  belief  may  have  been  a  factor 
in  determining  his  choice,  it  could  hardly  have  been 
the  determining  factor;  for  it  was  to  this  same  insti- 
tution he  sent  his  second  son,  Henry  Fitzmaurice. 
Gladstone  thought  the  selection  of  Cambridge  a  mis- 
take. According  to  him  Arthur  Hallam  would  have 
found  at  Oxford  studies  in  which  he  was  pre-eminently 
fitted  to  excel,  while  in  those  which  were  essential  to 
success  in  the  sister  university  he  had  no  interest,  and 
to  some  of  them  he  had  distinct  aversion.  At  Cam- 
bridge no  undergraduate  was  then  allowed  to  compete 
for  the  principal  honors  of  classical  study,  unless  he 
had  attained  a  certain  proficiency  in  mathematics. 
No  such  impediment  existed  at  Oxford.  There,  accord- 
ingly, his  friend  would,  in  Gladstone's  opinion,  have 
attained  the  highest  rank.  This  may  be  true.  Still 
it  has  to  be  remembered  that  had  Hallam  gone  to 
Oxford,  he  would  not  have  met  with  Tennyson.  The 
world  in  consequence  would  have  lost  not  only  one  of 
its  greatest  elegiac  poems,  but  the  memory  of  the  man 
himself  would  have  passed  away  almost  entirely, 
instead  of  being  enshrined,  to  use  Gladstone's  own 
words,  in  'Hhe  noblest  monument  (not  excepting 
Lycidas)  that  ever  was  erected  by  one  human  being 
to  another." 

One  gets  the  impression,  indeed,  that  Hallam  himself 
would  have  preferred  to  accompany  his  friend  to 
Oxford,  and  that  the  choice  of  Cambridge  was  due 
entirely  to  his  father's  wish  and  not  at  all  to  his  own. 
The  existence  of  this  state  of  mind  is  suggested  at 
least  in  a  letter  he  wrote  to  Gladstone  after  his  return 


ARTHUR  HENRY  HALLAM        593 

from  the  Continent.  *'I  have  been,  I  believe,  some- 
what changed,"  he  then  said,  ** since  I  last  saw  you. 
I  have  snatched  rather  eagerly  a  draught  from  the  cup 
of  life,  Avith  its  strange  mingling  of  sweet  and  bitter. 
All  this  should  rather  have  come  after  my  three  years 
of  college  than  before ;  but  nothing  can  cancel  it  now, 
and  I  must  on  in  the  path  that  has  been  chalked  out 
for  me.  I  have  no  aversion  to  study,  I  trust,  quite  the 
contrary;  though  my  ideas  of  the  essential  do  not 
precisely  square  with  those  of  the  worshipful  dons  of 
Cambridge. ' '  These  words  seem  to  imply  that  he  was 
not  disposed  to  take  kindly  to  the  studies  which  in  that 
institution  were  necessary  to  scholastic  success.  If  so, 
his  anticipations  were  realized.  To  many  men  of 
literary  and  philosophic  tastes  mathematics  is  a  sub- 
ject peculiarly  repugnant.  Such  it  assuredly  was  to 
Arthur  Hallam.  At  times,  indeed,  he  fell  into  fits  of 
profound  mathematical  despondency.  On  one  occasion 
while  there,  he  wrote  to  Gladstone  about  the  agony  he 
had  in  dealing  with  trigonometry.  If  so  comparatively 
elementary  a  subject  as  trigonometry  could  make  him 
gasp,  he  would  certainly  have  found  insuperable 
difficulty  in  breathing  at  all  the  rarefied  air  of  higher 
mathematics.  As  a  consequence  of  the  dislike  he 
entertained  for  the  studies  which  led  to  honors  at 
Cambridge,  he  took  no  high  rank  in  scholarship.  But 
one  far  more  than  counterbalancing  advantage  fell  to 
his  lot.  It  was  in  October,  1828,  that  he  came  up  to 
the  university,  where  he  entered  Trinity.  This  was 
a  few  months  later  than  Tennyson's  arrival  at  the 
same  college.     Between  him   and   the   poet   speedily 


594  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

sprang  up  a  peculiarly  ardent  friendship,  though, 
as  in  the  case  of  Gladstone,  he  was  nearly  two  years 
younger.  His  precociousness,  however,  and  his  un- 
usual attainments,  invariably  put  him  on  a  level  with 
men  older  than  himself. 

After  his  graduation  in  January,  1832,  Arthur 
Hallam  took  up  the  study  of  law.  This  was  not  because 
of  any  fondness  for  it  on  his  own  part  but  at  the  wish 
of  his  father.  It  was  not  a  study  which  appealed  to 
one  possessed  of  his  literary  and  philosophical  tastes ; 
but  to  it  he  applied  himself  dutifully.  His  health, 
however,  had  never  been  robust.  The  weakness  of  his 
constitution  had  always  prevented  him  from  taking 
part  in  the  games  in  which  his  schoolfellows  indulged. 
More  than  once  indeed  appeared  ominous  indications 
of  the  fate  ultimately  to  overtake  him,  which  awak- 
ened the  anxiety  of  his  friends;  though  probably  no 
one  of  them  anticipated  that  the  end  would  come  as 
early  as  it  did.  In  later  life,  Gladstone  observed  that 
in  his  Eton  days  marks  of  his  coming  doom  could  be 
traced,  after  a  period  of  exertion,  in  ''a  delicate  but 
deep  rosy  flush  upon  his  cheeks,  reaching  to  his  eyes." 
It  is  fairly  certain  that  his  health  was  not  benefited  by 
this  compulsory  attention  to  a  study  for  which  he  did 
not  care.  In  April,  1833,  he  was  stricken  down  by  a 
severe  attack  of  influenza  which  confined  him  to  his 
bed  for  several  weeks  and  from  the  effects  of  which, 
it  is  probable,  he  never  fully  recovered. 

Later  in  this  same  year  he  travelled  with  his  father 
on  the  Continent.    On  the  fifteenth  of  September  while 


ARTHUR  HENRY  HALLAM        595 

at  Vienna — a  city  which  Tennyson  could  never  be 
induced  to  ^dsit — he  passed  away  without  warning. 
The  father  returned  from  his  daily  walk  to  find  Arthur, 
who  had  been  for  some  days  indisposed,  Mng,  as  he 
thought,  asleep  on  his  couch.  For  an  hour  he  sat 
reading,  until  the  singular  stillness  attracted  his 
attention.  He  went  to  look  at  his  son  and  to  his 
inexpressible  grief  and  horror  he  found  him  not  asleep 
but  dead.  The  end  could  not  have  been  at  best  a  long 
time  deferred.  Owing  doubtless  to  some  inherited 
taint  of  blood,  probably  on  the  mother's  side,  the 
historian  was  fated  to  have  die  before  him  with  one 
exception  all  of  a  numerous  family  of  children.  With 
a  suddenness  equal  to  that  of  the  death  of  the  son, 
passed  away  his  wife  and  his  eldest  daughter  Ellen; 
nor  was  the  illness  of  his  second  son  protracted.  The 
medical  examination  in  Arthur  Hallam's  case  showed 
that  the  death  could  not  have  been  delayed  for  many 
years,  though  under  favoring  conditions  life  might 
perhaps  have  been  somewhat  prolonged.  ''Those 
whose  eyes  must  long  be  dim  with  tears,"  wrote  the 
afflicted  father,  ''and  whose  hopes  on  this  side  the 
tomb  are  broken  down  forever,  may  cling,  as  well  as 
they  can,  to  the  poor  consolation  of  believing,  that 
a  few  more  years  would,  in  the  usual  chances  of 
humanity,  have  severed  the  frail  union  of  his  graceful 
and  manly  form  with  the  pure  spirit  that  it  embodied. ' ' 
Arthur  Hallam's  body  was  taken  to  Trieste  and 
from  there  transported  by  sea  to  England.  On  the 
third  of  January,  1834,  he  was  buried  in  the  manor 


596  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

aisle^  of  the  Clevedon  church  in  Somersetshire  about 
a  mile  to  the  south  of  the  \dllage  of  Clevedon.  The 
church  stands  on  a  hill  overlooking  the  water  where 
the  Severn  empties  into  the  Bristol  Channel.  In  the 
middle  of  this  same  year  the  father  printed  for  private 
distribution  a  limited  number  of  copies  of  a  book  of 
four  hundred  pages  entitled  'Remains  of  A.  H.  H.' 
This  volume  consisted  of  selections  both  of  poems  and 
prose  pieces.  Most  of  them  had  been  printed  sepa- 
rately before ;  but  there  w^ere  a  few  pieces  which  had 
never  previously  seen  the  light.  The  collection  was 
preceded  by  a  brief  account  of  the  son's  life  and 
character.  To  it  were  appended  testimonials  from 
three  of  his  associates  in  school  and  college.  The 
names  of  these  were  not  given  but  they  are  well  known. 
The  first  came  from  his  Cambridge  friend,  Brookfield, 
the  two  others  from  his  Eton  schoolmates.  One  of 
these  was  Francis  Hastings  Doyle.  The  final  tribute 
came  from  Gladstone.  After  the  death  of  the  elder 
Hallam  this  volume  was  given  to  the  public  in  a  new 
edition  in  1863.  In  that  it  was  accompanied  by  a 
memoir  of  the  younger  son,  Henry  Fitzmaurice,  who 
died  at  Siena  in  October,  1850. 

The  tie  between  Hallam  and  Tennyson  had  become 
peculiarly  close  during  their  Cambridge  life.  It  was 
made  even  closer  from  the  time  when  the  former 
visited  the  latter  at  his  Somersby  home  in  1829.  There 
he  met  the  poet's   sister  Emily.     Between  the   two 

1  In  the  memoir  of  his  son,  the  father  spoke  of  his  being  buried  in 
"the  chancel";  and  this  Tennyson  followed  in  what  was  originally  the 
sixty-fifth,  now  the  sixty-seventh,  section  of  'In  Memoriam.'  When  he 
came  to  know  the  truth,  he  substituted  "the  dark  church." 


ARTHUR  HENRY  HALLAM        597 

sprang  up  an  attachment  which  in  a  short  period 
deepened  into  intense  love  on  both  sides.  Early  in 
1831  they  had  pledged  themselves  to  each  other.  They 
were  at  the  time  little  more  than  boy  and  girl.  Hallam 
was  then  of  the  age  of  twenty  and  Emily  Tennyson 
was  about  two  thirds  of  a  year  younger.  But  on  the 
part  of  both  it  was  something  more  than  the  fancy 
of  the  moment  which  comes  and  goes  with  the  passing 
of  a  few  careless  months.  Hostility  to  the  match  on 
the  part  of  the  Tennysons  there  could  well  be  none. 
Hallam 's  position  in  life,  besides  the  intimate  friend- 
ship which  existed  between  him  and  the  brother  of  the 
woman  he  loved,  precluded  the  possibility  of  any 
objection  coming  from  that  quarter  to  his  marrying 
the  sister.  It  was  from  the  Hallams,  if  from  any  one, 
that  opposition  to  the  union  was  to  be  expected.  In 
particular,  the  consent  of  the  father,  upon  whom  the 
son  was  dependent,  was  imperatively  needed. 

One  cannot  well  resist  the  impression  that  this 
attachment  of  the  eldest  son  to  Emily  Tennyson  was 
looked  upon  with  none  too  favorable  eyes  by  the 
Hallam  family.  At  least  such  seems  to  have  been  the 
case  at  the  outset.  It  was  certainly  not  unnatural  that 
the  feeling  should  exist.  Arthur  Hallam  had  not  yet 
attained  his  majority.  It  was  pretty  early  in  life  for 
one  little  more  than  a  mere  boy  to  mortgage  his  future 
unreservedly.  He  was  too  young  to  have  seen  much 
of  society  or  the  world.  Wider  experience  might 
change,  when  it  was  too  late,  his  judgment  both  of 
persons  and  things.  To  join  himself  at  this  early 
period  with  any  one  whatever  in  a  union  not  to  be 


598  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

dissolved,  might  justly  seem  an  act  of  imprudence,  to 
call  it  by  the  least  objectionable  phrase.  There  were 
other  reasons,  too,  which  might  tend  to  make  the 
prospect  of  such  a  marriage  distasteful  to  the  family. 
Arthur  Hallam  was  their  pride  and  hope.  With  his 
abilities,  with  his  prospects  in  life  as  well  as  mth  the 
position  and  reputation  of  his  father,  he  might  reason- 
ably look  forward  to  contract  what  would  be  a  brilliant 
alliance.  From  a  purely  worldly  point  of  view  there 
was  assuredly  nothing  to  excite  enthusiasm  in  the 
marriage  of  the  son  to  the  daughter  of  a  country 
clergyman  who  had  never  been  possessed  of  any  but 
comparatively  limited  means,  and  was  himself  soon 
after  dead.  The  bride  would  be  practically  penniless. 
Of  her  and  indeed  of  the  family  to  which  she  belonged 
the  Hallams  knew  little  or  nothing  save  what  the  son 
chose  to  tell;  and  long-continued  observation  has 
demonstrated  that  the  opinion  of  an  experienced  man, 
to  say  nothing  of  that  of  an  inexperienced  boy,  about 
the  qualities  and  perfections  of  the  woman  with  whom 
he  has  fallen  in  love  is  hardly  to  be  received  with  the 
trusting  faith  which  is  accorded  to  the  words  of  a 
divine  revelation. 

Still,  the  father  did  not  place  himself  in  open 
opposition  to  the  match.  He  simply  pleaded  for  delay. 
He  exacted  a  promise  from  his  son  that  he  should  not 
see  the  woman  of  his  choice  until  after  a  year  had 
elapsed.  At  the  end  of  that  time  Arthur  Hallam  would 
have  attained  his  majority.  In  turn  the  father 
promised  that  if  the  two  lovers  then  remained  in  the 
same  state  of  mind,  no  objection  should  be  raised  to 


ARTHUR  HENRY  HALLAM        599 

their  entering  into  a  formal  engagement.  Further- 
more, while  not  permitted  to  see  each  other  during  the 
interval,  they  were  not  debarred  from  corresponding. 
All  these  precautions  against  hasty  action,  which  might 
later  be  sorely  repented,  were  fair  and  just  enough. 
None  the  less  the  prohibition  of  actual  meeting  was 
one  hardly  to  be  accepted  by  the  lovers  with  thankful- 
ness. In  writing  to  Emily  Tennyson  in  July,  1831, 
Hallam  discussed  the  possibility  of  her  being  enabled 
to  go  to  Cheltenham  for  the  sake  of  her  health. 
'^Alas,"  he  added,  ''change  of  place  ^vill  bring  you  no 
nearer  to  me.  Whatever  place  you  make  a  Paradise  of 
by  dwelling  there,  for  me  the  flaming  brand  waves 
round  it  and  limits  me  to  the  wilderness  of  earth." 
Still  the  long  months  of  weary  waiting  made  no  change 
in  the  feeling  of  the  lovers.  When  the  time  was  up, 
when  Arthur  Hallam  had  reached  the  age  of  twenty- 
one,  he  hastened  at  the  earliest  moment  possible  to 
Somersby.  That  place  he  reached  late  in  the  month 
of  February,  1832.  He  left  it  after  a  few  weeks'  stay 
as  the  accepted  lover  of  Emily  Tennyson, 

But  the  troubles  of  the  two  were  far  from  being 
over.  Neither  one  possessed  the  means  which  would 
justify  their  entering  upon  a  married  life.  Arthur 
Hallam  was  dependent  upon  his  father.  At  his 
father's  wish  he  had  taken  up  the  study  of  law.  To 
him  it  was  eminently  distasteful.  In  his  eyes  it  was, 
what  he  himself  called  it,  the  driest  of  all  branches 
of  learning.  Still,  he  applied  himself  to  it  faithfully. 
The  one  thing  above  all  which  kept  up  his  courage  in 
what  he  termed  his  slavery  was  the  expectation  that 


600  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

through  its  agency  he  might  realize  the  possibility 
of  hastening  his  union  with  the  woman  he  loved.  This 
indeed  he  avowed  to  her  more  than  once.  ''It  is  the 
hope  of  securing  our  happiness, ' '  he  wrote  to  her  from 
Croydon  in  September,  1832,  "that  I  devote  myself 
to  a  life  so  uncongenial  to  me."  In  a  short  time  he 
was  to  resume  his  dreary  task-work  in  London.  "It 
would  not  do,"  he  said  in  a  later  letter,  "for  me  to 
play  truant  just  at  the  beginning  of  my  slavery ;  when 
I  shall  have  earned  my  task-master's  favour  by  my 
diligence,  I  may  be  let  out  of  Algiers  for  a  while." 
More  than  once  he  deplored  the  necessity  which  kept 
them  so  much  apart.  The  long  separation,  varied 
though  it  was  by  frequent  letters  and  occasional  meet- 
ings, weighed  heavily  upon  his  spirits  and  could  not 
have  been  favorable  to  his  health.  He  chafed  con- 
stantly against  the  bars  which  delayed  their  union. 
"Oh,  it  is  a  weary,  weary  time,"  he  wrote  to  his 
betrothed  in  April,  1833, — ^Hhree  years  now  since  I 
have  felt  that  you  were  my  only  hope  in  life — more 
than  two  since  we  plighted  to  each  other  the  word  of 
promise.  It  is  indeed  a  weary  time.  In  gaiety  and  in 
gloom,  alone  and  in  crowds,  the  one  thought  never 
ceases  to  cling  to  my  heart,  and  by  shomng  me  the 
possibility  of  happiness  makes  me  feel  more  keenly  the 
reality  of  misery." 

It  was  not  till  some  time  after  the  son's  death  that 
the  elder  Hallam  saw  the  woman  who  was  to  have 
been  that  son's  bride.  In  fact,  for  more  than  a  year 
after  the  engagement  had  taken  place,  there  had  been 
no  communication  between  the  two  families.     Conse- 


ARTHUR  HENRY  HALLAM        601 

quently  the  father  knew  really  nothing  of  her  who  was 
his  son's  choice,  nor  of  any  of  her  relatives  save  her 
brother  Alfred;  and  of  him  he  could  have  then  seen 
but  little.  The  situation  was  caused  mainly  by  distance 
of  space  which  in  those  days  could  render  the  possi- 
bility of  acquaintance  difficult,  and  that  of  intimacy 
almost  out  of  the  question.  It  was  not  till  towards  the 
tragic  close  that  this  barrier  was  at  all  removed.  In 
the  spring  of  1833  a  slight  acquaintance  sprang  up. 
Tennyson  then  visited  London  in  company  with  his 
sister  Mary.  There  in  April  the  two  met  the  family 
between  which  and  their  own  an  alliance  was  in 
contemplation.  The  first  meeting  was  not  looked 
forward  to  vdth  any  pleasure  by  the  sister,  and  in  fact, 
^vith  a  good  deal  of  trepidation.  But  everything  went 
off  successfully.  Mary  Tennyson  found  her  way  at 
once  into  the  hearts  of  her  prospective  connections. 
Arthur  Hallam  himself  was  overjoyed  at  the  result 
of  this  visit,  and  at  the  real  good  which  he  felt  it  had 
done.  "Mary,"  he  wrote  to  his  betrothed,  "is  a 
decided  favorite  with  all  of  us,  and  she  has  taken,  I 
hope,  one  of  her  fancies  to  my  mother.  Alfred  too  has 
got  up  in  my  father 's  good  graces. "  "I  feel, ' '  he  went 
on  to  say,  "as  if  a  great  barrier  was  broken  down 
between  my  family  and  that  of  my  adoption.  I  have 
tasted  a  rich  foretaste  of  future  union.  I  have  shown 
Ellen  a  sister.  I  have  heard  Somersby  tones  and  ways 
of  speech  finding  their  way  to  the  hearts  of  those  who 
sit  round  the  Walpole  street  fireside." 

There  is  no  doubt  that  this  visit  did  much  to  recon- 
cile the  Hallams  to  the  projected  marriage  of  their  son. 


602  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

Unfortunately  it  had  no  effect  in  hastening  it,  though, 
according  to  Tennyson's  own  words,  the  time  of  their 
union  had  been  definitely  fixed  before  the  departure 
abroad  on  the  last  fatal  journey/  There  is  indeed 
something  pathetic  in  Arthur  Hallam's  brief  career 
that  he  should  be  condenmed  to  pursue  a  profession 
he  did  not  love  and  at  the  same  time  to  be  deprived 
of  the  companionship  of  the  woman  he  loved.  One 
who  familiarizes  himself  with  their  story  cannot  but 
feel  regret  that  this  marriage  so  fervently  desired 
might  not  have  taken  place  at  once ;  that  two  persons 
so  passionately  attached  to  each  other  should  not  have 
had  the  privilege  of  spending  together  a  portion  of 
time  which  under  the  most  favorable  circumstances 
could  have  been  at  most  the  little  that  would  have  been 
allotted.  Yet  such  is  the  influence  of  the  mind  upon 
the  body  that  it  might  have  lengthened  Arthur 
Hallam's  too  brief  existence.  One,  two,  three  years, 
or  even  more  of  a  happy  married  life  might  have  been 
theirs  before  the  doom  fell  which  was  to  separate  them 
forever.  At  the  same  time  Hallam  's  father  acted  from 
the  best  of  motives.  Prudentially,  his  course  was 
perfectly  justifiable,  in  spite  of  the  sickness  of  heart 
which  came  to  the  lovers  from  hope  deferred.  Could 
the  death  of  his  son  have  been  foreseen,  the  father's 
conduct  might  and  probably  would  have  been  different. 
Very  possibly  he  came  to  regret  that  he  had  not 
sanctioned  the  union  of  the  lovers,  so  that  at  least  some 
months  if  not  years  of  married  felicity  might  have 
fallen  to  Arthur's  lot  before  his  untimely  death.     At 

1 '  Memoir, '  Vol.  I,  p.  304. 


AETHLT^  HEXRY  HALLAM  603 

all  events,  he  granted  to  his  son's  destined  bride  an 
income  of  three  hundred  pounds  a  year,  the  sum  which 
he  had  previously  allowed  to  the  son  himself ;'  nor  did 
he  withdraw  it  after  her  marriage  to  Richard  Jesse, 
a  lieutenant  in  the  royal  navy.  This  event  took  place 
at  Boxley  in  the  latter  part  of  January,  1842,  the 
ceremony  being  performed  by  the  Reverend  William 
Jesse,  ^dcar  of  Margeretting  in  the  county  of  Kent. 
Upon  the  Hallams  and  their  immediate  circle  the 
announcement  of  the  engagement  and  intended  mar- 
riage wrought  at  first  a  painful  impression.  To  them 
Emily  Tennyson  had  seemed  almost  a  widowed  member 
of  the  house,  and  the  sufferings  she  had  undergone  with 
the  physical  breakdown  which  had  followed  the  death 
of  her  lover,  led  to  her  being  regarded  with  mixed 
feelings  of  pity  and  romantic  admiration.  But  time 
and  reflection  brought  wiser  \iews.  Coupled  with  them 
was  pretty  surely  the  consciousness  that  it  would  have 
been  little  to  the  gratification  of  the  generous  nature 
of  her  dead  lover,  could  he  know  it,  that  the  woman 
to  whom  he  had  been  betrothed  should  spend  her  own 
life  in  unavailing  regrets  and  let  sorrowful  memories 
deprive  her  of  the  consolation  of  a  home  and  children 
of  her  own. 

To  two  members,  in  particular,  of  the  Tennyson 
family  Arthur  Hallam  's  sudden  and  unexpected  death 
came  with  as  great  a  shock  as  it  did  to  his  own.  Both 
to  the  brother  and  to  the  betrothed  sister  the  blow  was 
temporarily  prostrating.  Nor  did  either  recover  from 
it  speedily.     Emily  Tennyson's  health  had  been  deli- 

I'The  Journals  of  Walter  White,'  p.  141. 


604  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

cate  enough  to  excite  her  lover's  apprehension  during 
the  period  of  their  engagement.  Necessarily  it  was  not 
benefited  by  this  unexpected  and  crushing  calamity. 
For  many  months  she  was  ill,  and  though  she  recov- 
ered, she  recovered  very  slowly.  At  times  she  was 
almost  inclined  to  despair  of  her  own  life.  ''We  were 
waiting  for  her,"  wrote  later  one  of  her  friends,  '4n 
the  drawing-room  the  first  day  since  her  loss  that  she 
had  been  able  to  meet  anyone,  and  she  came  at  last, 
dressed  in  deep  mourning,  a  shadow  of  her  former  self, 
but  with  one  white  rose  in  her  black  hair  as  her  Arthur 
loved  to  see  her. ' "  As  late  as  the  middle  of  1834,  she 
had  not  met  the  Hallam  family,  though  from  them  she 
had  received  the  kindest  messages.  Utterly  prostrated 
as  she  was  in  mind  and  body,  she  could  not  summon 
the  mental  or  physical  strength  to  make  the  journey 
to  their  residence.  But  to  them  she  was  at  that  time 
purposing  to  go  as  soon  as  she  was  sufficiently 
recovered  from  the  state  of  weakness  under  which  she 
was  still  laboring.  ''What  is  life  to  me !"  she  wrote  to 
her  brother  in  July,  1834,  about  the  intended  visit; 
"if  I  die  (which  the  Tennysons  never  do)  the  effort 
shall  be  made. ' '  She  expressed  to  him  the  great  desire 
she  felt  to  make  the  acquaintance  of  the  Hallams, 
particularly  of  Ellen,  who  had  been  Arthur's  confi- 
dante in  his  love  affair.  "She  will  perhaps,"  she 
wrote,  "be  the  friend  to  remove  in  some  degree  the 
horrible  feeling  of  desolation  which  is  ever  at  my 
heart.  "^    Upon  Tennyson  himself  the  blow  was  almost 

1' Memoir,'  Vol.  I,  p.  108. 
2  Ibid.,  Vol.  I,  p.  135. 


ARTHUR  HENRY  HALLAM        605 

as  severe.  Under  the  influence  of  the  first  despondency 
which  came  over  him,  he  began  the  composition  of  the 
poem  entitled  'The  Two  Voices,'  which  consists  largely 
of  a  discussion  of  the  time-worn  question  whether 
life  is  worth  living.  Originally  it  was  styled  'The 
Thoughts  of  a  Suicide.'  Then  also  he  began  and 
continued  at  intervals  for  a  long  period  of  years  the 
composition  of  the  various  pieces  which  were  later 
to  make  up  the  volume  soon  to  be  considered. 

About  Hallam  himself  and  his  commanding  ability 
and  lofty  character  there  is  a  singular  unanimity  of 
opinion  among  those  with  whom  he  came  in  close 
contact.  We  are  far  from  being  limited  to  the  tribute 
paid  by  Tennyson  to  the  memory  of  his  friend.  The 
sentiments  he  expressed  were  shared  by  every  one  of 
the  immediate  circle  with  which  the  dead  man  was 
connected.  It  is  well  within  bounds  to  say  that  no  one, 
whose  life  was  so  early  cut  short,  received  more 
genuine  tributes  of  the  highest  kind  to  the  possibilities 
that  lay  in  his  future.  The  testimonials  are  not  merely 
exceptional  in  the  loftiness  of  the  estimate  expressed, 
they  are  rendered  more  exceptional  from  the  character 
of  those  who  express  them.  They  came  from  men  who 
were  themselves  to  become  on  various  lines  among  the 
most  noted  of  their  generation.  Their  utterances 
show  the  profound  impression  which  Arthur  Hallam 
made  upon  all  his  associates.  In  the  circle  by  which 
he  was  surrounded  at  Cambridge  he  was  generally, 
perhaps  universally,  reckoned  the  foremost;  and  this 
too  from  the  very  outset.  Individual  testimonies  all 
agree.    On  more  than  one  occasion  Milnes  bore  witness 


606  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

to  his  superiority.  In  December  of  the  very  year 
Hallam  entered  the  university,  he  wrote  about  him  to 
his  father.  "I  have  a  very  deep  respect  for  Hallam," 
he  said.  ''Thirlwall  is  actually  captivated  with  him. 
He  really  seems  to  know  everything,  from  metaphysics 
to  cookery.'"  Too  much  importance  may  easily  be 
attached  to  the  admiration  of  a  boy  for  a  boy,  but  the 
opinion  of  the  historian,  then  in  the  full  maturity  of 
his  powers,  cannot  so  easily  be  set  aside.  Later  Milnes 
repeated  even  more  strongly  his  first  impression.  He 
' '  is  the  only  man  here  of  my  own  standing  before  whom 
I  bow  in  conscious  inferiority  in  every  thing, ' '  he  said 
in  a  letter  of  February,  1829.' 

The  sudden  death  of  Hallam  brought  out  these 
testimonials  to  his  eminence  in  profusion.  To  his  sister 
Frances,  John  Mitchell  Kemble  sent  the  news  of  the 
unexpected  tragedy.  ' '  It  is, "  he  wrote, ' '  with  feelings 
of  inexpressible  pain  that  I  announce  to  you  the  death 
of  poor  Arthur  Hallam,  who  expired  suddenly  from 
an  attack  of  apoplexy  at  Vienna  on  the  13th  of  last 
month.  Though  this  was  always  feared  by  us  as 
likely  to  occur,  the  shock  has  been  a  bitter  one  to  bear ; 
and  most  of  all  to  the  Tennysons,  whose  sister  Emily 
he  was  to  have  married.  I  have  not  yet  had  the 
courage  to  write  to  Alfred.  This  is  a  loss  which  will 
most  assuredly  be  felt  by  this  age,  for  if  ever  man  was 
born  for  great  things,  he  was.  Never  was  a  more 
powerful  intellect  joined  to  a  purer  and  holier  heart; 
and  the  whole  illuminated  with  the  richest  imagination, 

1  R.  M.  Milnes 's  '  Life  and  Letters, '  Vol.  I,  p.  59,  Letter  of  December 
8,  1829. 

2  Ihid.,  p.  62. 


ARTHUR  HENRY  HALLAM        607 

with  the  most  sparkling,  yet  the  kindest  wit."  In  a 
similar  strain  Alford  paid  his  tribute.  In  a  letter  of 
1833  he  spoke  of  Hallam  in  terms  of  unmeasured 
admiration.^  *'He  was,"  he  wrote,  '*a  man  of  a 
wonderful  mind  and  knowledge  on  all  subjects,  hardly 
credible  at  his  age — younger  than  myself.  He  was  well 
acquainted  with  our  own,  French,  German,  Italian, 
and  Spanish  literature,  besides  being  a  good  classical 
scholar,  and  of  the  most  tender  and  affectionate  dis- 
position; and  there  was  something  admirably  simple 
and  earnest  in  all  he  said  or  did.  I  long  ago  set  him 
down  for  the  most  wonderful  person  altogether  I  ever 
knew. ' ' 

Later  in  his  poem  'The  School  of  the  Heart,'  pub- 
lished in  1835,  Alford  apostrophized  his  dead  friend, 
though  his  name  was  not  mentioned,  celebrated  his 
present  achievement  as  the  earnest  of  future  achieve- 
ment which  was  to  be  his,  had  he  lived.^  On  other 
occasions,  too,  he  bore  in  his  verse  similar  emphatic 
testimony.  So  in  the  same  style  of  unmeasured 
admiration  spoke  the  calm  and  judicious  Spedding. 
"The  compositions  which  he  has  left,"  he  said,  ''mar- 
vellous as  they  are,  are  inadequate  evidence  of  his 
actual  powers.  ...  I  have  met  no  man  his  equal  as 
a  philosophical  critic  on  works  of  taste ;  no  man  whose 
views  on  all  subjects  connected  with  the  duties  and 
dignities  of  humanity  were  more  large,  more  generous, 
and  more  enlightened."  Like  witness  to  his  repute 
among  his  early  associates  was  borne  by  his  Eton 

1  Letter  to  Fanny  Alford  in  'Life,  Journals  and  Letters,'  2d  edition, 
1873,  p.  93. 

2  Lesson  V,  Vol.  11,  pp.  65-66,  edition  of  1845. 


608  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

school-friend,  Sir  Francis  Hastings  Doyle.  In  his 
'Reminiscences'  he  tells  us  that  ''all  of  us,  even  Mr. 
Gladstone,  I  think,  felt  whilst  conversing  with  him, 
that  we  were  in  the  presence  of  a  larger,  profounder, 
and  more  thoughtful  mind  than  any  one  of  us  could 
claim  for  himself."  A  similar  opinion  was  expressed 
by  Frederick  Tennyson,  who  in  1817  had  left  the  school 
at  Louth,  and  had  gone  to  Eton  to  finish  his  prepara- 
tion for  the  university.  ''At  Eton,"  he  said  late  in 
life,  "I  think  our  impression  was  that  Hallam,  and  not 
Gladstone,  was  the  coming  great  man."^ 

To  the  tribute  of  affection  and  admiration  which 
Tennyson  paid  in  'In  Memoriam,'  Gladstone's  testi- 
mony to  Arthur  Hallam 's  powers  ranks  next  in 
importance.  On  several  occasions  he  celebrated  the 
actual  ability  and  possible  future  of  his  schoolboy 
friend.  "There  was  nothing,"  he  said,  "in  the  region 
of  the  mind  he  could  not  have  accomplished.  I  mourn 
in  him,  for  myself,  my  earliest  near  friend;  for  my 
fellow  creatures,  one  who  would  have  adorned  his  age 
and  country,  a  mind  full  of  beauty  and  of  power, 
attaining  almost  that  ideal  standard  of  which  it  is  a 
presumption  to  expect  an  example.  When  shall  I  see 
his  like!"  At  the  very  close  of  his  life  he  repeated  the 
same  opinion.  In  an  article  on  Hallam  which  appeared 
only  a  few  months  before  his  own  death,  he  celebrated 
in  enthusiastic  terms  the  lost  companion  of  his  youth, 
and  showed  that  the  impression  which  the  boy  had 
produced  continued  still  to  exist  in  the  mind  of  the 
man  of  advanced  years.     "It  is   simple   truth,"   he 

1 '  Memoir, '  Vol.  II,  p.  407. 


ARTHUR  HENRY  HALLAM        609 

wrote,  ''that  Arthur  Henry  Hallara  was  a  spirit  so 
exceptional  that  everything  with  which  he  was  brought 
into  relation  during  his  shortened  passage  through 
this  world,  came  to  be,  through  this  contact,  glorified 
by  a  touch  of  the  ideal.  Among  his  contemporaries  at 
Eton,  ...  he  stood  supreme  among  all  his  fellows; 
and  the  long  life  through  which  I  have  since  wound  my 
way,  and  which  has  brought  me  into  contact  ^vith  so 
many  men  of  rich  endowments,  leaves  him  where  he 
then  stood,  as  to  natural  gifts,  so  far  as  my  estimation 
is  concerned."^ 

In  considering  the  weight  to  be  attached  to  these 
opinions  it  is  to  be  kept  in  mind  that  those  who 
expressed  them  were  at  the  time  of  their  utterance, 
in  some  cases  little  more  than  boys,  and  boys  further- 
more who  were  under  the  influence  of  strong  personal 
affection.  In  those  of  the  number  who  gave  the  later 
testimonies,  they  could  hardly  fail  to  repeat  the 
impressions  and  beliefs  of  their  early  years.  More- 
over, Hallam's  attainments — and  for  one  so  young 
they  were  unquestionably  exceptional — were  largely 
along  lines  about  which  his  fellow  students  were  not 
competent  to  form  a  judgment.  Remarkable  as  they 
were,  they  were  little  likely  to  be  characterized  by  the 
extent  and  proficiency  with  which  they  were  credited 
by  his  admiring  associates.  All  of  us  are  disjjosed  to 
attribute  special  breadth  and  depth  of  information  to 
him  who  is  conversant  with  subjects  which  lie  outside 
of  our  own  range  of  studies.    He  who  knows  something 

1  Contributed  by  Gladstone  to  'The  Youth's  Companion,'  January  6, 
1898. 


610  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

of  which  others  know  little  or  nothing  is  fairly  sure 
to  gain  the  reputation  of  being  possessed  of  much  more 
knowledge  than  he  actually  has.  This,  which  is  true 
of  men,  is  much  truer  of  boys.  To  them  knowledge 
possessed  by  a  schoolfellow  along  lines  upon  which 
they  themselves  have  not  travelled,  partakes  of  the 
nature  of  the  extraordinary.  Here  was  one  of  their 
number  who  was  more  or  less  familiar  with  the  tongues 
of  modern  Europe,  of  which  most  of  them  knew  nothing 
at  all.  He  spoke  of  authors  who  to  them  were  at  best 
only  names,  even  if  they  were  as  much  as  names.  It 
is  accordingly  not  to  be  wondered  at  that  an  exagger- 
ated estimate  should  be  taken  by  them  of  Hallam's 
acquirements.  Alford,  as  we  have  just  seen,  described 
him  as  being  familiar  with  the  literatures  of  France, 
Italy,  Germany,  and  Spain.  To  have  gained  a  really 
full  and  intimate  acquaintance  with  a  single  one  of 
these  would  have  been  almost  the  work  of  a  lifetime. 

In  the  regular  studies  of  his  course  at  Cambridge, 
Hallam  did  not  attain  high  rank.  The  fact  is  not 
remarkable.  It  was  not  because  he  could  not  have 
mastered  them;  he  simply  had  no  taste  for  them.  In 
some  instances  he  had  a  distinct  distaste.  On  the  other 
hand,  those  in  which  he  took  delight  and  showed  the 
highest  proficiency  were  not  of  the  kind  that  led  there 
to  scholastic  distinction.  Two  honors,  nevertheless, 
fell  to  him  during  his  university  career;  but  neither 
of  these  implied  proficiency  in  the  special  studies  of 
the  course.  One  of  them  was  a  prize  for  an  essay  upon 
the  philosophical  writings  of  Cicero.  This  was  printed 
by  his  father  in  the  collection  he  made  of  the  writings 


ARTHUR  HENRY  HALLAM        611 

of  his  son.  In  1831  he  obtained  the  college  prize  for 
an  English  declamation  on  the  conduct  of  the  Inde- 
pendent party  during  the  Civil  War.  This  has  never 
been  printed.  He  was  graduated  in  1832  without 
honors.  But  making  the  fullest  allowance  for  his 
failure  to  achieve  success  in  the  distinctive  studies  of 
his  course,  it  remains  true  that  the  impression  he  left 
upon  all  his  associates,  several  of  whom  were  to  become 
among  the  most  noted  of  their  time  in  different  ways, 
must  be  regarded  as  extraordinary. 

Accordingly,  with  such  testimonials,  coming  from  so 
many  and  so  varied  quarters,  it  may  seem  presump- 
tuous, not  to  say  ungracious,  to  cast  any  doubt  upon 
the  fullest  realization  of  the  forecasts  which  were  made 
about  Hallam's  future;  to  question  the  absolute 
correctness  of  a  view  which  was  based  upon  the  knowl- 
edge which  comes  from  intimate  acquaintance.  It  is 
hardly  credible  that  the  man  was  lacking  in  the 
possibilities  of  highest  distinction,  who  had  attracted 
the  peculiar  regard  and  admiration  of  two  persons  in 
particular  who  were  to  become  in  their  respective 
lines  the  most  prominent  men  of  their  generation. 
There  is  little  reason  to  doubt  indeed  that,  in  certain 
ways,  Hallam,  had  he  lived,  would  have  attained 
eminence.  He  might  have  become  what  Tennyson 
prophesied,  *'a  potent  voice  in  parliament. "  He  might 
have  come  to  exercise  distinct  influence  in  shaping  the 
policy  and  destinies  of  his  native  land.  But  even  such 
fortune,  high  as  it  was,  would  hardly  have  satisfied  the 
expectations  of  his  admirers.  It  was  no  ordinary 
success   that   was   predicted   for   him;   it   was   to   be 


612  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

extraordinary.  For  us  it  is  only  by  considering  what 
he  has  left  behind  that  he  can  be  estimated.  Tennyson 
said  justly  that 

The  world  which  credits  what  is  done 
Is  cold  to  all  that  might  have  been. 

It  has  to  be  cold ;  for  the  pages  of  history  are  strewn 
Avith  the  lives  of  men  of  unfulfilled  promise,  of  men 
whose  apparently  high  prospects  of  success  have  never 
ripened  into  fruition,  and  have  sometimes  ended  in 
dismal  failure.  All  this  is  not  meant  to  imply  that 
Arthur  Hallam,  had  he  lived,  w^ould  not  have  fulfilled, 
at  least  to  a  great  extent,  the  hopes  of  his  admiring 
companions.  Still  it  is  noticeable  that  Gladstone  in 
the  last  year  of  his  life,  in  declaring  his  belief  that  his 
friend  would  have  attained  high  distinction,  added  ' '  as 
high  as  that  attained  by  his  distinguished  father." 
But  that  father,  justly  eminent  in  certain  ways  as  he 
was,  was  far  from  being  reckoned  among  the  greatest 
men  of  his  generation. 

So  far  as  his  actual  achievement,  while  living,  gives 
any  forecast-  of  the  future,  it  is  manifest  that  Hallam 
would  never  have  gained  distinction  as  a  poet.  The 
verse  he  wrote  was  good  of  its  kind ;  but  it  is  no  better 
than  what  scores  and  even  hundreds  of  accomplished 
men  have  written.  It  would  have  been  worthy  of  high 
respect;  but  the  world  is  overburdened  with  highly 
respectable  poetry.  The  only  reserve  that  Tennyson 
himself  made  in  the  estimate  of  his  friend's  powers 
was  that  though  Hallam  would  have  attained  the 
highest  summit  of  excellence  in  other  ways,  he  would 


ARTHUR  HENRY  HALLAM        613 

never  have  become  distinguished  as  a  writer  of  verse. 
But  would  he  have  attained  distinction  as  a  writer  of 
prose  f  Here  is  something  more  difficult  to  decide ;  for 
excellence  in  prose,  unlike  excellence  in  poetry,  is  not 
so  apt  to  have  its  existence  sharply  defined  at  an  early 
period  of  life.  Still  even  in  that  period  manifestation 
of  a  certain  degree  of  skill  in  expression  is  likely  to 
display  itself.  But  in  spite  of  Spedding's  designation 
of  Hallam's  compositions  as  marvellous,  there  is 
nothing  in  his  extant  remains  which  indicates  much 
promise  of  that  kind.  Solid  qualities  appear  in  them 
abundantly.  There  is  every  reason  to  believe  that 
whatever  he  said  would  always  have  been  worth  consid- 
ering for  the  material  it  contained.  The  knowledge 
would  have  been  ample,  the  matter  weighty,  the 
thought  occasionally  profound ;  and  it  would  have  been 
characterized  by  a  remarkable  sobriety  of  judgment. 
But  in  what  has  been  preserved,  that  indefinable  some- 
thing that  we  call  style,  which  carries  us  along  in  spite 
of  ourselves,  which  gives  enduring  charm  to  what 
would  otherwise  be  perishable,  this  seems  lacking. 
There  is  nowhere  exhibited  any  of  that  lightness  of 
touch,  that  grace,  that  peculiar  happiness  of  expres- 
sion, which  indicates  the  existence  of  the  consummate 
master  of  prose.  It  might  have  come  in  time ;  all  that 
we  can  say  is  that  there  is  little  trace  of  it  in  his  earliest 
production.  As  was  the  case  with  his  father's  work, 
the  weight  of  matter  is  set  off  by  little  charm  of 
manner;  and  without  the  latter,  prose  writing  gives 
little  prospect  of  present  distinction  or  prolonged 
remembrance. 


614  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

To  an  inquirer  who  expressed  to  him  the  disappoint- 
ment he  felt  in  reading  the  writings  of  Sterling,  John 
Stuart  Mill  made  the  following  reply.  "No  one,"  he 
said,  *Svho  had  not  heard  his  conversation  could  form 
the  faintest  conception  of  what  he  was. '  '^  To  account 
for  the  effect  some  men  produce  upon  those  with  whom 
they  come  in  contact,  the  influence  of  the  personal 
presence  must  be  taken  largely  into  account.  So  it 
may  have  been  with  Arthur  Hallam,  though  his  early 
death  prevents  any  conclusion  on  that  point  reaching 
any  higher  range  than  that  of  conjecture.  Still,  the 
impression  produced  by  the  writings  of  his  which  have 
been  preserved  is  that  in  the  pages  of  'In  Memoriam' 
a  monument  has  been  erected  to  his  memory  loftier 
than  any  which  it  would  have  been  in  his  power  to 
build  for  himself. 

There  is  one  particular,  however,  in  which  no 
hesitation  need  be  felt  in  expressing  positive  opinion. 
Personal  characteristics  Hallam  possessed  unquestion- 
ably, which  to  some  at  least  will  outweigh  all  con- 
ceivable distinctions  of  the  intellect.  These  were  the 
extreme  sweetness  and  nobility  of  his  nature,  and  the 
immeasurable  charm  of  his  manner.  Character  is 
something  which  can  ordinarily  be  estimated  with  as 
much  precision  when  life  is  at  its  beginning  as  when  it 
has  reached  its  close.  To  the  loftiness  and  purity  of 
Hallam 's  nature  there  is  but  one  testimony.  It  makes 
no  difference  whether  it  comes  from  the  affectionate 
partiality  of  relatives,  or  from  the  intimacy  of  personal 
friendship,  or  from  the  impression  produced  by  chance 

1  Grant  Duff's  'Notes  from  a  Diary,'  1881-1886,  Vol.  I,  p.  75. 


ARTHUR  HENRY  HALLAM        615 

meeting  with  strangers.  Everywhere  it  is  the  same. 
Fanny  Kemble  was  far  from  sharing  in  the  extreme 
admiration  which  her  brother  expressed  for  his 
friend's  commanding  ability.  She  was  herself  never 
given  to  effusive  overstatement.  She  never  lost  her 
mental  balance,  or  suffered  her  judgment  to  be  swayed 
by  the  enthusiasm  of  others.  This  makes  the  tribute 
she  paid  to  Hallam's  character  all  the  more  emphatic. 
She  spoke  of  the  almost  angelic  purity  of  his  nature 
in  the  account  she  gave  in  her  'Records  of  a  Girlhood' 
of  the  friends  who  gathered  about  her  as  she  was 
entering  upon  her  own  career.  ''The  early  death  of 
Arthur  Hallam,"  she  wrote,  "and  the  imperishable 
monument  of  love  raised  by  Tennyson's  genius  to  his 
memory,  have  tended  to  give  him  a  pre-eminence 
among  the  companions  of  his  youth  which  I  do  not 
think  his  abilities  would  have  won  for  him  had  he 
lived;  though  they  were  undoubtedly  of  a  high  order. 
There  was  a  gentleness  and  purity  almost  virginal  in 
his  voice,  manner,  and  countenance;  and  the  upper 
part  of  his  face,  his  forehead  and  eyes  (perhaps  in 
readiness  for  his  early  translation),  wore  the  angelic 
radiance  that  they  still  must  wear  in  heaven.  ...  On 
Arthur  Hallam's  brow  and  eyes  this  heavenly  light, 
so  fugitive  on  other  human  faces,  rested  habitually,  as 
if  he  was  thinking  and  seeing  in  heaven. ' ' 


CHAPTER  XXIII 
IN  MEMORIAM 

'In  Memoriam'  was  published  early  in  June,  1850. 
No  work  of  Tennyson's  had  ever  been  ushered  into 
the  world  with  any,  even  the  slightest,  preliminary 
flourish  of  trumpets.  But  the  indisposition  to  follow 
customary  methods  of  attracting  the  attention  of  the 
public  was  never  more  signally  manifested  than  in  the 
case  of  this  production.  Reticence  about  it,  both  before 
and  after  its  appearance,  was  carried  to  an  extreme. 
No  advertisement,  not  even  the  briefest,  announced 
its  coming  till  the  actual  day  of  publication.  No 
preliminary  notices  of  the  work  appeared  in  the  press 
to  excite  the  curiosity  or  the  interest  of  readers.  No 
name  of  the  person  who  had  written  it  was  found  on 
the  title-page.  Indeed,  not  only  at  the  very  outset,  but 
years  after  its  publication,  when  its  authorship  became 
well  known  everywhere,  no  indication  of  the  source 
from  which  it  came  was  given  in  Moxon's  advertise- 
ments. It  occupied  a  place  by  itself  in  the  newspaper 
columns  distinct  from  the  other  works  of  Tennyson. 
The  title-page  was  blank  save  for  the  words  'In 
Memoriam'  and  the  name  of  the  publisher  and  the 


IN  MEMORIAM  617 

place  and  date  of  publication.    The  obverse  page  bore 
simply  the  inscription 

IN  MEMORIAM 

A.  H.  H. 

obiit  MDCCCXXXIII. 

These  words  gave  no  hint  to  any  one,  outside  of  a 
very  limited  circle,  of  the  personality  of  the  man  in 
whose  memory  the  work  had  been  written.  Arthur 
Hallam  had  not  lived  long  enough  to  make  his  name 
familiar  to  the  public  during  his  lifetime,  and  beyond 
a  few  relatives  and  personal  friends  it  had  at  this  late 
day  passed  into  that  oblivion  which  waits  even  upon 
those  who  during  the  period  of  their  activity  are  fairly 
well  known.  With  all  this,  there  was  no  attempt  to 
hide  the  authorship  of  the  work  celebrating  him; 
equally  there  was  no  attempt  to  reveal  it.  This  latter 
is  certainly  true  so  far  as  the  poet  himself  was  con- 
cerned. But  Moxon  was  too  shrewd  a  business  man 
to  let  knowledge  of  this  sort  remain  hidden.  The  name 
of  Tennyson  had  now  come  to  have  a  distinct  commer- 
cial value.  Consequently,  though  the  publisher  did  not 
intrude  the  identity  of  the  writer  upon  the  reader,  he 
doubtless  saw  to  it  that  adequate  information  should 
be  conveyed  with  careful  carelessness  to  possible 
purchasers  of  poetry.  As  a  result,  both  author  and 
subject  were  at  once  kno^^^l  to  many  and  speedily 
became  known  to  all.  Even  a  few  days  before  the 
official  appearance  of  the  work,  Mudie,  who  had  just 


618  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

set  out  on  his  conquering  career  as  the  founder  of 
circulating  libraries,  advertised  that  fifty  copies  of 
Tennyson's  new  poem,  'In  Memoriam,'  could  be  had 
for  the  use  of  his  regular  subscribers  at  his  place  of 
business/  The  early  notices  of  the  work  had  no 
hesitation  in  proclaiming  its  author,  though  they  did 
not  always  state  it  as  positive  fact. 

One  amusing  exception  there  was  to  this  general 
belief  and  practice.  A  brief  but  highly  eulogistic 
notice  appeared  in  the  columns  of  a  London  weekly  a 
fortnight  after  the  publication  of  the  poem.  From 
internal  evidence  the  critic  concluded  it  to  be  the  work 
of  a  woman.  The  blunder  was  rendered  the  more 
emphatic  because  this  same  periodical  had  previously 
announced  the  volume  in  its  list  of  new  books  as  the 
work  of  Tennyson.  Of  that  fact  both  reviewer  and 
editor  were  manifestly  unaware.  ''If  by  a  female 
hand,"  WTote  the  former,  "as  it  purports  to  be,  we 
welcome  to  the  Muses '  banquet,  melancholy  though  the 
music  be,  one  of  their  sweetest  minstrels. ' '-  Naturally 
better  informed  contemporaries  were  unable  to  refrain 
from  speaking  somewhat  derisively  of  the  critic  who 
had  hailed  the  rising  of  a  new  poetical  star  in  a 
widow's  cap.  Even  had  the  author's  name  not  been 
judiciously  furnished  to  the  reading  world,  the  poem 
itself  would  have  revealed  its  authorship  to  any  one 
who  had  made  himself  familiar  with  Tennyson's 
previous  productions;  and  this  number  had  now 
become  large.     As  a  reviewer  of  the  time  remarked, 

1  London  'Times'  of  June  3;  'Spectator'  of  June  1. 
2 'Literary  Gazette,'  June  15,  1850. 


IN  MEMORIA^I  619 

in  commenting  upon  the  quiet  way  in  which  it  had 
stolen  into  the  world,  ''the  most  unostentatious  publi- 
cation, the  most  exemplary  secrecy,  and  the  blankest 
title-page,  could  not  long  have  kept  the  public  in  doubt 
as  to  the  authorship  of  these  poems.  "^ 

Singularly  enough  the  work  ran  the  risk  of  disap- 
pearing altogether  just  before  it  came  to  be  printed. 
The  manuscript  book  containing  it  had  been  left  by 
Tennyson  at  his  lodgings  in  London  on  his  return  to 
the  Isle  of  Wight.  As  soon  as  he  discovered  his  loss, 
he  sent  word  to  Coventry  Patmore,  asking  him  to  go 
to  the  house  where  he  had  been  staying  and  recover 
if  possible  the  work.  Patmore  acted  at  once.  With 
some  difficulty  he  succeeded  in  securing  from  the 
reluctant  landlady  access  to  the  room  which  the  poet 
had  occupied  but  which  had  now  been  again  let.  The 
search  was  successful  and  the  missing  manuscript  was 
forwarded  to  the  author.  Had  it  been  lost,  it  would 
probably  have  been  too  much  even  for  Tennyson's 
marvellous  memory  of  his  own  productions  to  have 
reproduced  it,  at  least  in  its  entirety. 

Only  two  poems  were  added  to  the  work  as  the 
successive  editions  appeared.  It  originally  consisted 
of  one  hundred  and  twenty-nine  pieces  which  for  the 
sake  of  convenience  Tennyson  himself  designated  as 
''sections,"  and  two  poems  which  served  as  prelude 
and  as  conclusion.  The  second  and  third  editions, 
which  followed  speedily,  contained  no  changes  save 
the  correction  of  misprints.  To  the  fourth  edition  of 
1851  was  added  what  is  now  the  present  fifty-ninth 

I'Tait's  Edinburgh  Magazine,'  August,  1850,  Vol.  XVII,  p.  499. 


620  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

section.  This,  though  written  before,  had  been  sup- 
pressed. Nothing  further  was  added  till  the  publica- 
tion of  the  miniature  edition  of  1870.  Then  appeared 
for  the  first  time  the  present  thirty-ninth  section. 
With  that  the  poem  assumed  its  final  definitive  form. 

*In  Memoriam'  had  one  distinction  which  none  other 
of  Tennyson's  works  had  ever  enjoyed.  From  the 
very  moment  of  its  publication  it  was  greeted  with  an 
almost  unanimous  chorus  of  approval  by  the  critical 
press.  Inevitably  there  were  degrees  in  the  fervor 
with  which  the  work  was  received ;  but  as  a  whole  the 
reviewers  reflected  accurately  for  once  the  attitude  of 
the  educated  public.  The  latter  indeed  was  so  enthu- 
siastic that  hardly  one  of  the  former  dared  go  so  far 
in  defying  its  verdict  as  to  "hint  a  fault  or  hesitate 
dislike."  Those  who  dissented  from  the  general 
estimate  did  so  silently;  they  rarely  gave  expression 
to  their  -sdews  in  print.  There  were,  however,  occa- 
sional virulent  attacks ;  and  there  was,  of  course,  half- 
hearted appreciation. 

One  of  the  most  singular  beliefs  entertained  and 
expressed  in  several  of  the  early  critical  notices  was 
that  'In  Memoriam'  could  not  and  would  not  be  widely 
popular — at  least  this  would  be  true  of  it  at  the  outset. 
This  was  not  a  view  taken  by  those  who  were  disposed 
to  regard  the  poet  himself  with  a  certain  degree  of 
indifference,  not  to  say  disfavor.  Nor  was  it  the  view 
of  the  very  few  who  thought  poorly  of  the  work  itself. 
On  the  contrary,  it  was  often  held  by  some  who  were 
warm  in  their  admiration  both  of  Tennyson  and  of 
'In  Memoriam.'    Most  convincing  reasons  were  given 


IN  MEMORIAM  621 

for  this  belief.  The  subject,  it  was  said,  was  by  its 
very  nature  monotonous.  A  series  of  variations  on 
what  was  essentially  the  same  theme  could  interest 
only  a  limited  number,  in  spite  of  the  beauty  of  the 
verse  in  which  the  theme  was  presented.  'The 
Examiner' — its  article  was  doubtless  written  by 
Forster — spoke  of  the  work  in  terms  of  highest  praise. 
It  declared  that  'In  Memoriam'  was  ''perhaps  the 
author's  greatest  achievement."  Yet  it  ended  its 
review  with  the  following  prophecy :  "  It  is  not  a  poem 
to  become  immediately  popular;  the  nature  of  the 
subject,  the  unavoidable  monotony,  and  as  it  were 
weariness  of  sorrow,  in  whatever  changing  forms  of 
beauty  presented,  would  itself  prevent  this."^  Still, 
the  writer  added,  that  by  its  appeal  to  the  imagination, 
the  reason,  and  the  faith,  it  would  ultimately  acquire 
and  maintain  its  hold.  The  same  discouraging  view 
of  the  success  of  the  poems  was  taken  by  'The 
Atlas. '  ' '  They  are  too  mournfully  monotonous, ' '  were 
its  words.  ' '  There  is  too  much  of  the  egotism  of  grief 
in  them  to  suffer  us  to  encourage  the  belief  that 
they  will  find  as  large  a  circle  of  readers  as  other 
emanations  of  Tennyson's  muse."" 

It  might  have  occurred  to  these  critics  that  'lit 
Memoriam'  was  a  poem  of  almost  universal  appeal. 
Few  are  the  households  in  which  there  are  not  vacant 
chairs.  Few  are  the  individuals  who  have  not  had 
to  mourn  the  loss  of  those  near  and  dear.  To  a  world 
full  of  sorrowing  hearts  and  of  sad  but  sacred  memo- 

1  June  8,  1850. 

2  June  15,  1850. 


622  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

ries  this  work  came  as  a  solace  and  a  help.  Equally 
did  it  appeal  to  another  class.  Every\vhere  could  be 
found  thoughtful  men  haunted  and  perplexed  by 
doubts  and  fears,  uncertain  where  to  find  a  secure 
resting-place  in  any  possible  solution  of  the  ever 
recurring  problems  of  human  life  and  destiny.  To  all 
such  it  was  an  unspeakable  consolation  and  a  help  to 
dwell  upon  the  struggles  of  a  man  who  had  fought  his 
way  through  honest  doubt,  who  had  triumphed  over 
despair,  who  had  encountered  and  vanquished  the  army 
of  fears  which  had  been  assailing  their  own  hearts, 
and  had  finally  secured  for  himself  a  firm  foothold  in 
faith.  In  truth  his  appeal,  instead  of  being  limited 
as  even  friendly  critics  thought,  could  hardly  have 
been  addressed  to  a  wider  circle  of  readers.  Had 
Tennj^son  been  seeking  for  immediate  success,  he  could 
hardly  have  chosen  a  theme  which  would  arouse  the 
interest  of  more  thousands.  The  effect  it  produced  is 
brought  out  vividly  in  a  letter  of  Archbishop  Benson. 
*'7n  Memoriam,^'  he  wrote  not  long  before  his  death, 
**was  inexpressibly  dear  to  me  for  the  best  part  of  my 
life.  It  came  out  just  when  my  mother  and  Harriet 
died.  I  sank  into  it  and  rose  with  it,  and  I  used  to 
teach — to  love  it.'" 

The  result  certainly  discredited  all  the  vaticinations 
of  the  critical  prophets.  No  book  of  poetry  of  any 
author  of  the  Victorian  era  ever  made  at  once  so 
profound  an  impression  upon  the  minds  of  contem- 
poraries.   This  refers  specifically  to  its  influence ;  but 

I'The  Life  of  Edward  White  Benson,'  by  his  son,  1899,  Vol.  II, 
p.  412. 


IN  MEMORIAM  623 

the  influence  was  reflected  in  its  sale.  Never  indeed 
has  any  elegiac  poem  in  the  English  language,  or 
perhaps  in  any  language,  leaped  at  once  immediately 
into  so  wide  a  popularity.  The  'Poems'  of  1842  and 
'The  Princess,'  from  the  point  of  view  of  great  sale, 
had  made  their  way  slowly.  Not  so  'In  Memoriam.' 
It  shows  how  well  recognized  had  now  become  Tenny- 
son's position  that  the  first  edition  of  the  poem  con- 
sisted of  five  thousand  copies.  It  took  only  six  weeks 
to  exhaust  this  number.  In  the  case  of  his  other  works, 
it  usually  required  some  time  for  the  public  to  recover 
from  the  foolish  opinions  of  men  of  letters ;  but  in  the 
case  of  'In  Memoriam'  no  one  troubled  himself  to  wait 
for  the  verdict.  In  the  middle  of  June  the  second 
edition  followed.  It  in  turn  was  followed  by  a  third, 
which  came  out  at  the  end  of  November.  Nor  did  the 
demand  then  cease.  A  fourth  edition  appeared  in  less 
than  three  months,  in  January,  1851.  Accordingly, 
within  the  year  of  its  publication,  four  large  editions 
of  the  poem  had  been  put  upon  the  market.  No 
information  has  been  published  of  the  number  of  copies 
belonging  to  these  subsequent  issues;  but  they  could 
not  have  been  well  less  than  the  first,  and  were  in  all 
probability  much  greater. 

The  public  indeed  had  waited  for  no  criticism  to 
declare  itself.  Its  enthusiasm  outran  all  the  calcula- 
tions of  its  literary  advisers.  Long  before  any  periodi- 
cals had  had  the  opportunity  to  express  their  judg- 
ments, the  world  of  readers  had  taken  the  matter  into 
their  own  hands.  The  very  earliest  notices  of  the 
poem,  even  when  most  favorable,  were  in  a  measure 


624  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

guarded.  Not  so  those  which  speedily  followed.  As 
in  the  case  of  '  The  Princess, '  the  first  utterances  which 
were  most  outspoken  in  their  praise,  seem  faint  when 
compared  with  the  fervid  eulogies  which  soon  came  to 
be  the  fashion.  Before  the  year  was  over,  before  it 
had  in  fact  got  well  along,  the  critical  estimate  was 
marked  by  an  enthusiasm  which  had  never  been  mani- 
fested for  any  other  of  Tennyson's  works.  The 
^Westminster'  printed  an  article  which  was  almost 
wildly  enthusiastic  in  praise  of  the  work.  It  gave  in 
full  fifteen  of  the  poems,  and  it  was  apparently  with 
some  difficulty  that  the  writer  was  kept  from  giving 
them  all.^  In  truth,  there  was  little  limit  to  the 
panegyrics  accorded  everywhere.  ''No  one  endowed 
with  a  perception  of  what  poetry  is,  could  have  closed 
the  volume  without  a  full  conviction  that  it  was  the 
creation  of  the  first  poet  of  the  day,"  said  'Tait's.'^ 
It  is  ''the  noblest  English  Christian  poem  which 
several  centuries  have  seen, ' '  said  '  Fraser  's.  '^  It  went 
on  to  add  in  a  reference  to  the  anonymous  character  of 
the  work,  that  the  poet  would  have  no  quarrel  with  the 
critics  who  alluded  to  him  as  the  author,  "were  he 
aware  of  the  absolute  idolatry  with  which  every  utter- 
ance of  his  is  regarded  by  the  cultivated  young  men 
of  our  day  at  the  universities."  The  practical  una- 
nimity of  fervent  praise  which  waited  upon  the  new 
work  forms  a  sharp  contrast  to  the  recognition,  at 
times  almost  grudging,  which  had  been  given  to  his 
two  previous  productions,  favorable  as  that  must  be 

1  October,  1850,  Vol.  LIV,  Dp.  85-103. 

2  Vol.  XVII,  p.  499. 
8  Vol.  XLII,  p.  252. 


IN  MEMORIAM  625 

considered  in  certain  instances.  For  the  first  time  in 
Tennyson's  career,  critical  approval  kept  pace  even 
remotely  with  popular  approval. 

Two  re\'iews,  however,  may  be  singled  out  for  their 
depreciatory  character.  One  comes  from  an  English 
and  one  from  an  American  source.  The  latter  is  worth 
mentioning  only  as  a  curiosity  in  criticism.  The 
former  deserves  a  more  extended  notice,  partly  from 
the  time  when  and  the  place  where  it  appeared ;  partly 
because  it  embodied  the  usual  stupid  objections  which 
were  made  to  the  poem;  but  mainly  for  the  effect  it 
wrought  upon  the  feelings  of  a  distinguished  pulpit 
orator  of  the  Church  of  England  and  for  the  impor- 
tance he  attached  to  it.  From  his  first  appearance  in 
1830  to  the  publication  of  'In  Memoriam,'  Tennyson 
had  been  subjected  to  all  sorts  of  criticism  from  silly 
panegjaic  to  malignant  depreciation.  He  had  encoun- 
tered feeble  criticism,  supercilious  criticism,  patron- 
izing criticism,  appreciative  criticism,  unappreciative 
criticism,  just  and  discriminating  criticism.  But  it 
was  now  his  fortune  to  receive  the  attention  of  a  critic 
who  surpassed  his  contemporaries.  To  characterize 
suitably  the  folly  of  this  particular  piece  of  criticism 
makes  one  regretfully  aware  of  the  limitations  of 
language.  The  writer,  so  far  as  inferences  can  be 
dra^vn  from  what  he  said,  was  a  heavy,  prosaic, 
muddle-headed  man,  who  had  read  up  several  of  the 
elegiac  poems  of  the  language  for  the  sake  of  fixing 
pegs  upon  which  to  hang  his  discourse.  His  review 
appeared  in  the  London  'Times'  a  year  and  a  half  after 
the  publication  of  'In  Memoriam' — to  be  precise,  on 


626  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

the  twenty-eighth  of  November,  1851.  It  was  headed 
'The  Poetry  of  Sorrow,'  and  occupied  three  columns 
and  a  half.  The  title  gave  the  critic  opportunity  to 
disport  for  a  while  over  the  field  of  elegiac  verse ;  and 
he  improved  it  so  far  as  he  knew.  It  was  in  fact  one 
of  those  discursive  reviews  which  deal  little  directly 
with  the  matter  in  hand.  Accordingly,  no  small  part 
of  the  article  had  nothing  to  do  with  its  real  subject. 
But  the  critic  refrained  at  last  from  exhibiting  his  own 
extensive  reading,  and  bestowed  his  attention  upon 
what  was  set  before  him.  In  so  doing  he  made  two 
things  manifest.  One  was  his  assumed  knowledge  and 
actually  profound  ignorance  of  the  poet's  literary 
career.  The  other  was  his  open  confession  of  his 
inability  to  comprehend  the  meaning  of  certain  pas- 
sages which  it  required  peculiar  incapacity  not  to  be 
able  to  understand.  There  was  indeed  in  this  review 
a  sort  of  perfunctory  praise  given  to  certain  portions 
of  Tennyson's  work.  The  temper  of  the  English 
people  had  now  become  such  that  this  was  an  ingre- 
dient which  the  most  censorious  of  critics  felt  it 
necessary  to  throw  in. 

Tennyson  had  at  last  won  his  way  to  the  headship  of 
English  poetry.  He  had  lived  through  years  of 
indifference  and  neglect,  of  depreciation  indeed  and 
venomous  criticism.  With  an  astounding  ignorance 
of  these  facts  in  his  literary  history,  the  writer  of  the 
article  in  the  '  Times '  began  by  paying  a  tribute  to  the 
easy  path  by  which  the  poet  had  won  his  way  to 
renown.  ** Perhaps  of  modern  poets,"  he  wrote, 
**Mr.  Tennyson  has  met  with  fewest  obstacles  on  the 


IN  MEMORIAM  627 

high-road  to  reputation.  The  famous  horseman  of 
Edmonton  did  not  find  his  gate  thro\\Ti  back  mth  a 
more  generous  abandonment  of  the  tax."  Accord- 
ingly, as  the  critical  turnpike  had  of  late  been  care- 
lessly attended,  the  writer  felt  it  his  duty  to  see  that 
the  rules  of  the  road  were  more  rigorously  enforced. 
Thereupon  he  proceeded  to  point  out  certain  leading 
defects  in  'In  Memoriam.'  One  was  the  enormous 
exaggeration  of  the  grief.  This  was  unreal,  we  are 
told.  It  produced  a  sense  of  untruthfulness  which 
could  not  be  removed.  Far  superior  on  this  account 
were  the  lines  of  Dr.  Johnson  on  the  death  of  Levett. 
This  single  remark  gives  of  itself  a  fairly  complete 
conception  of  the  taste  and  judgment  of  the  critic. 
The  second  defect  was  the  tone  of  amatory  tenderness 
pervading  the  poem.  This  was  something  quite 
improper  to  be  addressed  by  a  man  to  a  man.  "The 
taste,"  he  said,  "is  displeased  when  every  expression 
of  fondness  is  sighed  out,  and  the  only  figure  within 
our  view  is  Amaryllis  of  the  Chancery  Bar."  Still, 
it  is  fair  to  say  that  the  critic  was  faithful  throughout 
to  his  intellectual  limitations.  Shakespeare's  sonnets, 
he  tells  us,  were  liable  to  the  same  objection.  These 
as  well  as  'In  Memoriam'  must  be  condemned  by  the 
"tasteful"  critic. 

Another  objection  to  the  poem  was  the  obscurity 
pervading  many  of  its  passages.  This  same  sort  of 
obscurity,  it  was  added,  ran  more  or  less  through  aU 
of  Tennyson's  productions.  It  was  obscurity  which 
arose  not  from  excess  but  from  want  of  meaning.  The 
critic  found  much  that  it  was  impossible  for  him  to 


628  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

comprehend, — and  after  the  manner  of  critics  in 
general,  he  assumed  because  it  was  incomprehensible 
to  him  that  it  was  beyond  the  limits  of  human  compre- 
hension. Unfortunately  for  himself,  he  made  the 
mistake  of  citing  several  of  these  incomprehensible 
passages.  ''We  have,"  he  said  in  one  instance, 
''applied  every  known  test  without  detecting  the 
slightest  trace  of  sense."  His  lack  of  comprehension 
was  due  to  his  own  lack  of  sense.  He  was  furthermore 
shocked  by  finding  that  the  language  occasionally 
bordered  on  blasphemy.  As  if  blasphemy  were  not 
enough,  he  charged  Tennyson  also  with  bad  grammar. 
Here  again  he  gave  specimens  of  certain  violations 
of  the  rules  laid  down  by  Lindley  Murray.  These 
examples  of  inaccuracy  furnished,  as  might  have  been 
expected,  conclusive  proof  that  the  reviewer's  lin- 
guistic ignorance  was  on  a  par  with  his  literary  taste. 
Then  came  that  solemn  pronouncement  which  is  the 
tag  to  most  cheap  criticism.  "Small  as  this  book  is," 
he  said,  "it  may  be  abridged  with  profit." 

Along  with  its  pretentiousness  and  arrogance,  so 
much  ignorance  was  displayed  that  the  review  excited 
among  Tennyson's  admirers  merriment  rather  than 
irritation.  Furthermore  it  excited  amazement.  The 
merriment  was  due  to  the  character  of  the  article ;  the 
amazement  at  the  place  of  its  appearance.  Pope's 
couplet — 

The  things,  we  know,  are  neither  rich  nor  rare, 
But  wonder  how  the  devil  they  got  there, — 

expressed  the  feeling  that  generally  prevailed.  One 
of  the  consequences  was  that  another  writer  set  out 


IN  MEMORIAM  629 

to  review  in  turn  Tennyson's  critic.  In  this  he  enter- 
tained himself  by  shoeing  the  unusual  limitations  of 
knowledge  and  the  unusual  obtuseness  of  perception 
which  had  formed  an  indispensable  requirement  for 
writing  the  review  in  question.  His  article  had  for  its 
title  'The  ''Times"  and  the  Poets.''  This  heading 
had  evidently  been  suggested  by  Tennyson's  reply  to 
Bulwer — '  The  New  Timon  and  the  Poets. '  The  writer 
took  delight  in  explaining,  as  if  to  a  dull  boy,  the 
meaning  of  passages  which  according  to  his  own 
account  the  newspaper  critic  had  tasked  his  mental 
powers  in  vain  to  comprehend.  It  required  no  David 
indeed  to  slay  this  stupidest  of  Philistines.  In  com- 
menting upon  the  charge  of  undue  amatory  tenderness, 
he  incidentally  recalled  to  the  attention  of  the  reviewer 
the  lament  of  David  for  Jonathan,  and  intimated  that 
up  to  this  time  no  one  had  dubbed  the  warrior  king  of 
Israel  a  sickly  sentimentalist  because  of  the  intensity 
of  affection  he  had  expressed  for  his  fallen  friend. 

One  of  the  passages  whose  meaning  he  kindly 
explained  to  the  reviewer  is  worth  citing  here  because 
of  the  opportunity  it  affords  of  giving  Tennyson's 
o^m  explanation  of  how  he  came  to  write  it.  These 
are  the  lines  referring  to  Hallam — 

And  over  those  ethereal  eyes 
The  bar  of  Michael  Aiigelo. 

The  reviewer  in  the  'Times'  had  not  ventured  to 
declare  these  lines  incomprehensible.  An  uneasy 
dread   that  by   openly  confessing  his   ignorance   he 

I'Tait's  Edinburgh  Magazine,'  January,  1852,  Vol.  XIX,  p.  18. 


630  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

might  be  thought  to  expose  the  asses 's  ears  too  con- 
spicuously led  him  to  express  himself  with  caution. 
* '  We  shall  not  say, ' '  he  wrote,  '  *  if  we  can  comprehend 
the  closing  line.  We  can  keep  a  secret."  The  secret 
which  he  dared  not  reveal  his  critic  was  kind  enough 
to  disclose.  He  referred  him  to  so  common  a  work 
as  the  'Penny  Cyclopaedia.'  There  under  the  medal- 
lion portrait  of  Michael  Angelo  which  precedes  the 
account  of  his  life,  the  existence  of  the  mysterious 
*'bar"  was  plainly  visible.  The  lines  in  fact  were  a 
remembrance  on  Tennyson's  part  of  the  words  which 
Hallam  had  applied  to  himself  in  their  university 
days.  When  asked  later  the  meaning  of  the  lines  the 
poet  recalled  the  incident  which  led  him  to  make  use 
of  the  phrase.  ''Those,"  he  replied,  "are  almost 
Hallam 's  own  words.  You  must  have  noticed  in  all 
portraits  of  Michael  Angelo  the  bulging,  bony  ridge 
over  the  eyes,  technically  called  by  artists  the  'bar.' 
Hallam  had  this  bony  ridge  very  prominent,  and  one 
day,  when  we  were  at  Cambridge,  he  came  into  my 
room,  and  while  talking,  passed  his  fingers  across  his 
brow  and  said,  'Alfred,  I've  got  the  real  "bar"  of 
Michael  Angelo.'  "^ 

To  the  modern  reader  the  only  amusing  thing  about 
this  mere  twaddle  of  the  critic  is  that  any  one  should 
have  taken  it  seriously.  Of  course  Tennyson  himself 
would  always  have  to  be  excepted;  for  nobody  could 
write  anything  sufficiently  stupid  not  to  give  annoy- 
ance to  that  most  thin-skinned  of  natures.    Strangely 

1  '  Personal  Recollections  of  Alfred,  Lord  Tennyson, '  by  W.  Gordon 
McCabe,  'Century  Magazine'  (New  Series),  Vol.  XLI,  p.  731. 


IN  MEMORIAM  631 

enough,  there  was  another  highly  gifted  man  who 
shared  in  this  feeling.  This  w^as  the  noted  divine,  the 
Eeverend  Frederick  William  Robertson.  He  was  at  the 
time  incumbent  of  Trinity  Chapel,  Brighton.  There  he 
melded  extraordinary  influence  both  with  his  hearers 
and  with  the  outside  public  by  the  fervor  of  his 
eloquence  and  the  exalted  spirituality  of  his  discourse. 
But  though  possessing  many  of  the  highest  qualities 
of  mind  and  heart,  Robertson  lacked  almost  wholly  the 
sense  of  humor.  It  led  him  to  underrate  the  intel- 
ligence of  his  fellow  men.  While  other  people  were 
laughing  not  ivith  the  *  Times '  but  at  it,  he  was  trans- 
ported with  righteous  indignation.  He  apparently 
fancied  that  this  particular  review  would  do  serious 
harm  to  Tennyson's  reputation,  and  affect  injuriously 
the  circulation  of  'In  Memoriam. '  This  was  not 
because  he  attached  any  importance  to  the  matter  it 
contained,  but  because  it  had  appeared  in  a  paper 
wielding  the  supposed  influence  of  the  leading  London 
daily.  He  appeared  to  believe  that  readers  would 
forego  the  right  of  private  judgment  because  an 
anonymous  writer — very  fortunately  for  his  memory 
anonymous — had  inserted  a  depreciatory  review  of  the 
poem  in  this  newspaper. 

Accordingly,  Robertson  set  out  to  show  that  the 
critic  did  not  understand  the  scope  of  the  poem  and 
the  idea  which  underlay  it.  This  he  did  incidentally 
in  the  course  of  two  lectures^  which  he  delivered  at 
Brighton,  in  February,  1852,  before  the  members  of 

1  '  Two  Lectures  on  the  Influence  of  Poetry  on  the  Working  Classes,  * 
Brighton,  1853, 


632  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

the  Mechanics'  Institute.  It  was  no  difficult  matter  to 
carry  out  his  object.  Assuredly  it  was  labor  thrown 
away  so  far  as  it  aimed  to  counteract  the  influence  of 
the  article;  for  the  article  had  exerted  no  influence. 
No  one  in  fact  but  Robertson  seems  to  have  paid  any 
serious  attention  to  it.  He  seems  to  have  forgotten 
that  Tennyson  was  no  longer  an  unknown  and  unin- 
fluential  poet.  Tennyson  had  found  his  audience,  and 
that  audience  consisted  of  the  immense  majority  of 
cultivated  readers  in  all  English-speaking  lands.  Such 
men  paid  little  heed  to  an  article,  no  matter  where 
appearing,  which  did  hardly  more  than  leave  a  mingled 
impression  of  the  wordiness  of  him  who  wrote  it  and 
the  wordiness  of  what  he  wrote.  Indeed  Tennyson  had 
now  become  a  far  greater  power  in  literature  than  any 
periodical — whether  daily,  weekly,  or  monthly — could 
ever  hope  to  be.  Still,  Robertson's  attitude  is  of 
interest  as  showing  how  great  was  now  the  hold  which 
the  poet  had  gained  over  the  minds  of  the  thoughtful 
men  of  his  generation,  and  how  quick  they  were  to 
resent  the  derogatory  observations  of  the  few  who 
succeeded  in  getting  them  into  print. 

One  charge  made  by  the  reviewer  excited  particu- 
larly the  wrath  of  Robertson.  This  was  that  of 
blasphemy.  For  the  religious  teachings  of  the  poem 
he  had  unbounded  admiration.  ''To  my  mind  and 
heart,"  he  wrote  to  a  correspondent,  "the  most 
satisfactory  things  that  have  been  said  on  the  future 
state  are  contained  in  the  'In  Memoriam. '  "^     This 

1  Stopf ord  Brooke 's  *  Life  and  Letters  of  Frederick  W.  Kobertson, ' 
1865,  Vol.  II,  p.  79. 


.J 


IN  MEMORIAM  633 

charge  of  blasphemy  had  been  enunciated  by  the 
reviewer  with  an  unctnousness  which  would  have  done 
credit  to  Uriah  Heep.  ''Can  the  writer,"  he  said, 
''satisfy  his  0"wti  conscience  with  respect  to  these 
verses, 

And  dear  as  sacramental  wine 
To  dying  lips  is  all  he  said. 

For  our  own  part  we  should  consider  no  confession  of 
regret  too  strong  for  the  hardihood  that  indited  them." 
One  may  well  hope  that  it  is  not  so,  but  it  is  to  be  feared 
that  this  piece  of  affected  sanctimoniousness  led  to  a 
feeble  alteration  in  the  first  verse.    The  lines  now  read 

And  dear  to  me  as  sacred  wine 
To  dying  lips  is  all  he  said. 

The  change  was  made  in  the  sixth  edition,  the  first 
which  followed  the  criticism  in  the  'Times.'  It  is  one 
of  the  few  changes  for  the  worse  which  are  found  in 
Tennyson's  poems.  It  hardly  seems  possible  that  the 
poet  of  his  own  accord  could  have  substituted  the 
prosaic  sacred  for  sacramental. 

It  was  nevertheless  reserved  for  a  reviewer  on  this 
side  of  the  Atlantic  to  produce  a  criticism  of  'In 
Memoriam'  which,  in  spite  of  its  brevity,  made  the 
article  in  the  'Times'  seem  painfully  inadequate.  It 
was  a  delightful  specimen  of  original,  or  more  properly 
speaking,  of  aboriginal  criticism.  The  most  desperate 
onslaughts  on  Tennyson  of  the  decadents  of  the  closing 
years  of  the  nineteenth  century  and  the  beginning  of 
the  twentieth  seem  pale  and  bloodless  beside  the  havoc 


634  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

wrought  by  this  wielder  of  the  tomahawk  of  trans- 
atlantic criticism  who  had  set  out  to  secure  and  hang 
at  his  belt  the  scalp  of  the  poet  and  incidentally  those 
of  the  poet's  admirers.  The  notice  of  'In  Memoriam,' 
short  enough  to  be  given  in  full,  appeared  in  'Brown- 
son's  Quarterly  Review'  for  October,  1850.  If  internal 
evidence  be  of  any  value,  it  came  from  the  pen  of  the 
editor  himself.  Brownson  was  a  man  of  a  good  deal 
of  repute  in  his  time,  though  little  remembered  in  these 
days.  He  was  a  redoubtable  theological  gladiator  who 
had  been  at  different  times  during  his  stormy  career 
the  doughty  champion  of  almost  every  sort  of  ortho- 
doxy or  heterodoxy,  and  had  never  been  able  to  find 
himself  in  complete  accord  with  any  one  form  of 
Christian  faith.  He  had  been  by  turn  Presbyterian, 
Universalist,  Unitarian.  He  had  now  for  some  time 
taken  refuge  in  the  Roman  Catholic  faith.  There  his 
orthodoxy  was  occasionally  viewed  with  suspicion  and 
even  underwent  investigation.  In  literature  he  was 
one  of  those  who  were  disgusted  with  the  vogue  which 
Tennyson  was  more  and  more  gaining.  He  was 
incapable  of  appreciating  the  poet  and  made  no 
attempt  to  hide  the  fact.  In  his  secret  heart  he  felt 
that  his  indifference  was  a  proof  of  his  own  supremacy. 
An  inferior  race  of  men  lacking  in  courage  and  ability 
might  like  Tennyson ;  not  so  he.  As  a  consequence  he 
gave  utterance  to  the  following  piece  of  criticism  which 
should  never  be  suffered  to  lie  in  its  present  obscurity ; 
for  he  said  on  this  side  of  the  Atlantic  what  certain 
people  on  the  other  side  felt  but  did  not  venture  to 
express. 


IN  MEMORIAM  635 

"This  poem,"  remarked  the  reviewer,  ''said  to  be 
by  Tennyson,  is  presented  us  by  its  publishers  in  all 
the  luxury  of  paper  and  type.  We  find  our  contem- 
poraries in  England  and  in  this  country  speak  highly 
of  it,  and  rank  its  author  at  the  head  of  living  English 
poets.  We  suppose  we  must  be  destitute  of  the  bump 
of  poetry,  for  we  certainly  are  unable  to  admire 
Tennyson,  or  to  discover  any  other  merit  in  him  than 
harmonious  verse  and  a  little  namby-pamby  sentiment. 
We  broke  down  before  reading  twenty  pages  of  the 
volume  before  us.  It  is  doubtless  all  our  own  fault, 
and  owing  to  our  inability  to  detect  or  appreciate  true 
poetic  gems.  In  brief  words,  Tennyson  is  not  a  poet 
to  our  taste.  That  he  has  a  poetic  temperament,  we 
can  believe;  that  he  scatters  here  and  there  a  real 
poetic  gem  in  his  works,  we  are  not  disposed  to  deny; 
but  to  us  he  is  feeble,  diffuse,  and  tiresome.  He  strikes 
us  as  a  man  of  feeble  intellect,  as  wanting  altogether 
in  the  depth  and  force  of  thought  indispensable,  not 
to  the  poetic  temperament,  but  to  the  genuine  poet. 
He  seems  to  us  a  poet  for  puny  transcendentalists, 
beardless  boys,  and  miss  in  her  teens.'" 

There  is  no  question  that  this  is  a  critical  gem  which 
should  not  be  lost. 

With  the  publication  of  'In  Memoriam,'  Tennyson 
entered  upon  the  fulness  of  his  fame.  All  the  obstacles 
which  had  stood  in  the  way  of  his  acceptance  by  the 
public  had  been  surmounted.  The  long  days  of  depre- 
ciation or  of  half-hearted  appreciation  were  now  over. 
For  the  next  twenty  years   he   reigned   not  merely 

1 ' Brownson 's  Quarterly  Review,'  Vol.  IV  (New  Series),  pp.  539-540. 


636  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

without  a  rival  but  without  any  poetical  contemporary 
being  in  what  may  be  called  speaking  distance.  During 
the  period  in  particular  covered  by  this  work,  he  was 
in  the  heyday  of  his  triumphant  progress.  To  find  in 
English  literature  any  parallel  to  the  general  accept- 
ance of  his  superiority  we  must  go  back  to  the  time 
of  Pope  in  the  second  quarter  of  the  eighteenth 
century;  or  to  that  of  Byron  in  the  first  quarter 
of  the  nineteenth  from  the  time  of  the  publication  of 
the  first  two  cantos  of  'Childe  Harold'  to  his  death  at 
Missolonghi  in  1824. 

Of  course  there  were  dissentients.  Hostility  there 
was,  though  it  was  rarely  open.  It  found  expression 
in  anonymous  attacks  in  newspapers  to  which  the 
depredator  could  gain  access.  But  for  a  long  time 
there  was  not  much  even  of  this.  The  men  who 
thought  poorly  of  Tennyson 's  poetry  either  kept  their 
opinion  to  themselves  or  for  their  own  sakes  might 
better  have  done  so  when  they  published  it  under  their 
own  names.  It  had  no  effect  whatever  upon  the  repu- 
tation of  the  poet  so  far  as  the  public  was  concerned; 
it  was  upon  their  own  reputation  with  the  public  that 
the  greatest  damage  was  wrought.  During  the  sixth 
decade,  indeed,  the  domination  of  Tennyson  assumed 
almost  the  nature  of  tyranny.  The  feeling  prevailing 
during  this  period  is  strikingly  brought  out  in  a 
communication  sent  to  the  biographer  of  William 
Morris.  It  was  written  towards  the  end  of  his  life  by 
the  church  historian  and  minor  poet,  Richard  Watson 
Dixon,  Canon  of  Carlisle.     Dixon  entered  Pembroke 


IN  ME:\I0RIA]VI  637 

College,   Oxford,   in   1851.     While   there   he   became 
associated    ^vith    men — especially    Burne-Jones    and 
Morris — who  were  later  to  form  a  constituent  part  of 
the  Praeraphaelite  Brotherhood.     The  testimony  lie 
bore  late  in  life — he  died  in  1900 — gives  the  modem 
reader  a  fair  impression  of  the  extravagant  admiration 
which   was    entertained   at   that   time    for   the   poet, 
particularly    among    educated    young    men.      ''It    is 
difficult,"   he  wrote,   "to   the   present   generation   to 
understand  the  Tennysonian  enthusiasm  which  then 
prevailed  both  in  Oxford  and  the  world.    All  reading 
men   were    Tennysonians ;    all    sets    of   reading   men 
talked  poetry.     Poetry  was  the  thing;  and  it  was  felt 
with  justice  that  this  was  due  to  Tennyson.    Tennyson 
had  invented  a  new  poetry,  a  new  poetic  English ;  his 
use  of  words  was  new,  and  every  piece  that  he  w^rote 
was   a   conquest   of   a  new  region.     This   lasted   till 
'  Maud, '  in  1855 ;  which  was  his  last  poem  that  mattered. 
I  am  told  that  in  this  generation  no  University  man 
cares  for  poetry.    This  is  almost  inconceivable  to  one 
who  remembers  Tennyson's  reign  and  his  reception 
in   the   Sheldonian   in    '55.     There   was   the   general 
conviction  that  Tennyson  was  the  greatest  poet  of  the 
century;  some  held  him  the  greatest  of  all  poets,  or  at 
least  of  all   modern   poets."     The  intensity   of   the 
admiration  which  then  prevailed   among  the  young 
men  of  the  time  is  borne  out  by  the  Canon's  concluding 
remark.     "As  to  Tennyson,"  he  said,  "I  would  add 
that    we    all    had    the    feeling    that    after    him    no 
farther  development  was  possible:  that  we  were  at 


638  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

the  end  of  all  things  in  poetry.    In  this  fallacy  Morris 
shared. '  '^ 

As  already  suggested,  it  is  not  meant  to  be  implied 
that  there  was  no  discordant  note  in  this  unqualified 
admiration.  That  which  had  never  happened  in  the 
case  of  anybody,  no  matter  who  or  what  he  was,  could 
not  be  expected  to  happen  in  the  case  of  Tennyson. 
In  him  special  limitations  were  perceived,  or  thought 
to  be  perceived,  even  by  fervent  admirers.  The 
examples  given,  indeed,  sometimes  strike  the  reader 
as  being  rather  the  limitations  of  the  critic  than  of 
the  poet.  Dixon  gives  as  an  illustration  the  attitude 
of  Morris.  That  he  described  as  a  defiant  admiration. 
*'He  perceived,"  wrote  the  Canon,  "Tennyson's  limi- 
tations, as  I  think,  in  a  remarkable  manner  for  a  man 
of  twenty  or  so."  The  examples  given  of  this  per- 
ception would  now  strike  men  generally  as  remarkable, 
though  in  another  sense  from  that  intended  by  the 
writer,  even  had  they  come  from  a  man  of  twice  twenty. 
"He  said  once,"  continues  the  Canon,  "  'Tennyson's 
Sir  Galahad  is  rather  a  mild  youth.'  Of  'Locksley 
Hall'  he  said,  apostrophizing  the  hero,  *My  dear 
fellow,  if  you  are  going  to  make  that  row,  get  out  of 
the  room,  that's  all.'  Thus  he  perceived  a  certain 
rowdy,  or  bullying  element  that  runs  through  much  of 
Tennyson's  work:  runs  through  'The  Princess,'  'Lady 
Clara  Vere,'  or  'Amphion.'  "  As  the  only  one  who 
ever  made  this  discovery  in  the  pieces  specified,  the 
criticism  deserves  mention.  "On  the  other  hand," 
continued  Dixon,  "he  understood  Tennyson's  great- 

1  J.  W.  Mackail's  'Life  of  William  Morris,'  Vol.  I,  pp.  44-46. 


IN  MEMORIAM  639 

ness  in  a  manner  that  we,  who  were  mostly  absorbed 
by  the  language,  could  not  share.  He  understood  it 
as  if  the  poems  represented  substantial  things  that 
were  to  be  considered  out  of  the  poems  as  well  as  in 
them. ' ' 

Xo  supremacy  of  this  sort  can  be  wielded  by  a  man 
in  his  lifetime  save  for  a  limited  period  of  years. 
Dryden  in  his  great  political  satire,  in  speaking  of  the 
fickleness  of  the  English  people  in  the  matter  of 
politics,  observed 

For  governed  by  the  moon,  the  giddy  Jews 
Tread  the  same  track  when  she  the  prime  renews : 
And  once  in  twenty  years  their  scribes  record, 
By  natural  instinct  they  change  their  lord. 

The  same  disposition  shows  itself  in  the  case  of  their 
literary  sovereigns.  A  really  great  author  never  loses 
a  commanding  position  in  the  world  of  letters.  But 
that  commanding  position  in  which  there  is  scarcely 
heard  a  protest  against  his  rule  can  hardly  last  much 
more  than  a  score  of  years.  Rival  claimants  to  the 
throne  will  be  set  up  by  eager  partisans.  But  after 
all,  these  are  usually  mere  eddies  in  the  stream  of 
commendation.  He  is  never  displaced  from  his  high 
position  or  even  from  the  highest  unless  some  man  of 
indisputably  greater  genius  arises.  Tennyson's  place 
at  the  head  of  English  men  of  letters,  though  several 
times  strongly  assailed  in  his  later  years,  was  never 
seriously  shaken  during  his  lifetime.  The  limits  of 
the  present  work  do  not  permit  the  consideration  of 
the  reaction  against  his  absolute  domination  which 


640  LIFE  AND  TIMES  OF  TENNYSON 

first  began  to  manifest  itself  during  the  closing  years 
of  the  seventh  decade.  It  never  gained  sufficient  force 
to  dethrone  him;  it  had  to  content  itself  with  pro- 
claiming to  select  circles  the  rights  of  rival  claimants. 
Occasionally  cliques  could  be  found  who  sincerely 
persuaded  themselves  that  they  had  disposed  of  his 
pretensions  to  general  recognition  because  they  found 
a  ready  concurrence  with  their  views  in  the  small  body 
of  which  they  formed  a  part.  As  Tennyson  himself 
expressed  it,  they  took  the  rustic  cackle  of  their  bourg 
for  the  murmur  round  the  world. 


INDEX 


INDEX 


Ackermann,  Rudolph,  246,  259, 

Addison,  48. 

Adeline,  223,  237. 

.3]lius  Lampridius,  48. 

^schylus,  223. 

Albert,  Prince  Consort,  21,  572, 
585. 

Alford,  Henry,  with  Tennyson  at 
Cambridge,  65 ;  writes  for  '  The 
Tribute, '  271 ;  Tennyson  classed 
with,  364;  his  School  of  the 
Heart,  365,  477,  607;  the 
'Edinburgh'  places  him  above 
Tennyson,  372;  Wilson  on,  473, 
474,  480,  482;  his  opinion  of 
Hallam,   610. 

Alison,   Sir  Archibald,   191. 

All  good  Things  have  not  Icept 
aloof,  350,  407. 

All  Things  will  Die,  210,  235. 

Allen,  Dr.  Matthew,  376,  501,  502, 
508. 

AUingham,  William,   432. 

'American  Review,'  461,  558. 

Amphion,  638. 

'Amulet,   The,'   250. 

Anacreontics,  265,  266. 

'Analytical  Review,'  98. 

'Annual  Register,'  277. 

'Anti- Jacobin   Review,'   98. 

Antony  to  Cleopatra,  58. 

ApoUonius  Rhodius,  47. 

'Apostles,'  69-84,  90,  301,  374. 

Archseus,  see  Sterling. 

'Arcturus,'  386,  387. 


Arnold,  Matthew,  his  Prize  Poem, 
80;  his  opinion  of  Wordsworth, 
141,  142;  on  Macaulay's  Lays, 
487;  FitzGerald's  opinion  of, 
552. 

Ashburton,  Lord,  388. 

'Athenaeum,'  founded,  83,  104; 
connection  with  '  Apostles, '  84, 
301;  attacks  Satan,  183;  re- 
views Poems  of  1832,  301;  on 
Lockhart,  326;  Cunningham's 
contributions  to,  343;  reviews 
St.  Agnes,  366;  reviews  Poems 
of  1842,  422,  424;  cited  by  Fitz- 
Gerald,  551,  552;  recommends 
Mrs.  Browning  for  laureateship, 
577,  578,  582,  584,  588. 

'Atlas,'  founded,  105;  FitzGer- 
ald's opinion  of,  105;  review 
of  Satan,  184;  of  Poems  of 
1830,  226,  300;  of  Poems  of 
1842,  426;  of  In  Memoriam,  621. 

Audley  Court,  388. 

Austen,  Jane,  15,  551. 

Bailey,  Philip  James,  492. 
Baillie,  Joanna,  470,  472,  473,  485. 
Barrett,   PJlizabeth,   see  Browning, 

Mrs. 
Barrow,  Sir  John,  95. 
Bartol,  Cyrus  A.,  522. 
Barton,  Bernard,  257-258,  570. 
Battle  of  Armageddon,  77. 
Beattie,  James,  48. 
Beddoes,  Thos.  L.,  482. 


644 


INDEX 


Bedford,  Grosvenor,  254. 

Benson,  Archbishop,  622. 

Blackbird,  The,  392. 

Blackwood,  William,  95,   120,  311. 

'  Blackwood 's '  Cockney  School, 
114,  298. 

'Blackwood's  Magazine,'  founded, 
100;  sets  new  standard,  101; 
popular  estimation  of,  102;  Chal- 
dee  MS.,  Ill;  Cockney  School 
of  Poetry,  114,  298;  assails 
Hunt,  115-117;  assails  Shelley, 
117;  assails  Keats,  117,  120- 
124,  315-319,  324;  Wilson  its 
leading  critic,  130,  181,  463;  on 
Campbell,  140;  on  Montgomery, 
181,  185;  reviews  Tennyson,  230- 
243,  291,  321,  326,  336,  351,  401, 
402,  465-496;  Tennyson's  dread 
of,  293-294;  Hypocrisy  Un- 
veiled, 310;  review  of  Wilson's 
Lights  and  Shadows,  311-312; 
Moir's  relation  to,  364;  reviews 
Clare's  Poems,  371;  attitude 
towards  authors,  476;  on  Ster- 
ling, 482-483;  on  Mrs.  Brown- 
ing,  4S9. 

Blakesley,  Dean  J.  W.,  16-17,  76- 
77,  155. 

Bonaparte,  349,  414. 

'Book  of  Beauty,'  251,  258,  261. 

Boswell's  Johnson,  19-20. 

Bowles,  Caroline,  see  Southey, 
Mrs. 

Bowles,  William  Lisle,  191,  192, 
214,  259,  480. 

Bowring,  Sir  John,  207. 

Boyd,  Hugh  Stuart,  146. 

Bradley,  Dean,  421. 

Bristed,  Charles  Astor,  277,  405, 
558, 

'British  Critic,'  99. 

'British  Review,'  99. 


Brooke,  Stopford  Augustus,  55-56. 

Brookfield,  William  Henry,  at 
Cambridge  with  Tennyson,  64; 
opinion  of  Oxford,  72;  gets 
Tennyson  to  contribute  to  '  The 
Keepsake, '  269 ;  letter  to,  about 
Lady  Wortley,  271;  tribute  to 
Hallam,  596. 

Browning,  Robert,  and  publicity, 
10-11  ;  opinion  of  Frederick 
Tennyson,  37,  221;  friend  of 
Forster,  105;  impressed  by 
Shelley,  152-153 ;  Moxon  's  state- 
ment about  Artevelde,  166,  357- 
358;  his  opinion  of  Charles 
Tennyson,  221  ;  his  opinion  of 
W.  J.  Fox,  288;  Moxon  declines 
Paracelsus,  357,  358;  his  King 
Victor,  391 ;  letter  to  Domett 
about  the  Poems  of  1842,  399, 
400,  409;  letter  to  Miss  Barrett 
about  Tennyson,  404,  405,  413; 
Forster 's  panegyric  of,  419,  485- 
486;  Wilson's  ignorance  of,  483, 
491-492;  letter  to  Miss  Barrett 
about  Moxon,  500;  Mill's  lack 
of  appreciation  of,  508;  letter 
from  Miss  Barrett  about  The 
Princess,  531 ;  approval  from 
the  Praeraphaelites,  549 ;  his 
Sordcllo,  549,  550;  FitzGerald's 
opinion  of,  551-552;  Pollock's 
friendship  for,  551;  suggested 
for  laureateship,  572,  584. 

Browning,  Mrs.  Robert,  opinion 
of  'The  Atlas,'  106;  admires 
Wordsworth  and  Byron,  145- 
146 ;  letter  to  Home  about 
Montgomery,  192;  contributes 
to  Annuals,  259;  publishing  of 
poetry  a  speculation,  358 ; 
charged  with  imitating  Tenny- 
son,   369,    370,    490;    unable    to 


' 


INDEX 


645 


procure  Poems  of  1830,  384; 
her  work  praised  by  Wilson, 
489-490,  492;  Miss  Mitford's 
letter  about  her  poems,  500; 
letter  to  Browning  about  The 
Princess,  531;  thinks  Hunt 
should  be  laureate,  577;  Chorley 
recommends  her  for  laureateship, 
578,  579,  580,  583-584,  588. 

Brownson,  Orestes  A.,  634-635. 

'  BroM-nson  's  Quarterly  Review, ' 
634-635. 

Bryant,   WiUiam   Cullen,   256. 

Buckingham,  James  Silk,  83. 

Buller,  Charles,  64. 

Bulwer,  E.  G.  (Lord  Lytton),  at 
Cambridge,  64;  writes  a  Prize 
Poem,  80;  his  popularity,  110; 
reviews  of  his  works.  111;  as- 
sailed by  Fraser's,  185;  con- 
tributor to  Annuals,  258-259; 
reviews  Poems  of  1832,  304,  305; 
calls  Tennyson  '  School-Miss 
Alfred,'  322;  publishes  Eva, 
390;  Wilson's  opinion  of,  482; 
his  early  verse,  516;  his  novels 
and  plays,  516-519;  his  attack 
on  Tennyson,  519-529,  629;  re- 
lation between  Tennyson  and, 
524-525;  mentioned,  508,  518, 
520,  521,  522,  523,  528,  529. 

Buonaparte,  see  Bonaparte. 

Burke,  Edmund,  48. 

Burne-Jones,  Sir  E.,  637. 

Buruey,  Fanny,  19. 

Burns,  Robert,  130,  220. 

Butler,  Fanny  Kemble,  see  Kem- 
ble. 

Byron,  Lord,  Medwin's  Journal, 
9;  influence  on  Tennyson,  37-38, 
48-49,  52,  55;  Hours  of  Idleness, 
41,  42;  his  posing  for  effect, 
49,  50;   his  influence  on  Charles 


Tennyson,  51 ;  his  influence  in 
general,  68,  129,  134,  142-150, 
421,  482,  490,  492,  636;  com- 
parison with  Wordsworth,  68, 
83,  154;  at  Cambridge,  71; 
comparison  with  Tennyson,  S3; 
opinion  of  'British  Review,'  99; 
Lockhart  's  review  killed  Keats, 
122;  on  Jeffrey's  review  of  En- 
dymion,  123,  124,  and  Childe 
Harold,  469-470;  Wilson's  opin- 
ion of,  130,  480;  admired  by 
Taylor,  148 ;  comparison  with 
Shelley,  153-157;  Cain,  182; 
Moore's  life  of,  186;  compari- 
son with  Montgomery,  191; 
Childe  Harold,  308;  Tennyson 
calls  his  poetry  rhetoric,  339; 
attacks  Jeffrey,  469;  Bulwer 
compares  Byron  and  Tennyson, 
529;  his  opinion  of  Rogers,  573; 
mentioned,  44,  48,  49,  119,  128, 
138. 

Caillie,  Rene,  80. 

'Cambridge  University  Magazine,' 
459. 

Cameron,  Mrs.,  14,  168. 

Campbell,  Thomas,  influence  on 
Tennyson,  49,  53;  editor  of 
'Xew  Monthly  Magazine,'  102; 
Jeffrey's  opinion  of,  129;  posi- 
tion and  influence,  139-141,  492, 
500;  life  of  Lawrence,  186;  con- 
tributor to  Annuals,  259;  ac- 
count of,  in  'Eraser's,'  359;  in- 
fluence on  Mrs.  Browning,  370; 
Pilgrims  of  Glencoe,  390;  Wil- 
son 's  criticism  of,  480. 

Canning,  George,  107. 

Carlyle,  Thomas,  reminiscences  of 
Tennyson,  17;  Life  of  Sterling, 
90;  contributor  to  Annuals,  259; 


646 


INDEX 


account   of,   in   'Fraser's, '   359; 
refuses  to  review  Montgomery's 
Luther,  391;  French  Bevolution, 
482;    description    of   Dr.    Allen, 
501 ;  tries  to  secure  pension  for 
Tennyson,    504-505;     his    prose, 
508;    his    opinion    of    Tennyson, 
551. 
Gary,  Henry  F.,  258. 
A  Character,  157. 
Charge  of  the  Light  Brigade,  213. 
Chaucer,  39,  71. 
Check  every   Outburst,  266. 
Chesterfield,  Lord,  204. 
Chorley,    Henry    Fothergill,    critic 
of    'The     Athenffium,'    422-424, 
577-578;        recommends        Mrs. 
Browning  for  laureateship,  577- 
588. 
'Christian  Examiner,'  383,  450. 
'Chronicle,'  108. 
'Church  of  England  Quarterly  Ee- 

view,'  427,  435. 
Cicero,  48,  610. 
Clare,  John,  371,  466. 
Claribel,  349. 

Clark,  Willis  Gaylord,  256. 
Claudian,  48. 
Cleghorn,  James,   101. 
Colburn,  Henry,  103. 
Coleridge,  Hartley,  235,  354. 
Coleridge,  Henry  Nelson,  344. 
Coleridge,  John  Taylor,  110. 
Coleridge,  Samuel  Taylor,  at  Cam- 
bridge,    71,    73;     at     Highgate, 
128;   Jeffrey's  opinion  of,   129; 
his  position   and   influence,    139, 
141  ;    thought   Charles   Tennyson 
superior  to  Alfred,  214-215;  con- 
tributor   to    the    Annuals,    258- 
259;   opinion  of  Tennyson,  343- 
345;  Spedding's  opinion  of,  354; 
accoimt  of,   in   'Fraser's,'   359; 


Wilson's  criticism  of,  480; 
Forster's  estimate  of,  485. 

'Comic  Annual,  The,'  250. 

Conversazione  Society,  see  'Apos- 
tles. ' 

Cornwall,  Barry,  see  Procter. 

Cowell,  Prof.  E.  B.,  opinion  of 
BroT\-ning,  551. 

Cowley,  Abraham,  55,  72. 

Cowper,  William,  48,   130. 

Crabbe,  George,  comparison  of 
Tennyson  with,  44;  Jeffrey's 
opinion  of,  129;  Wilson's  opin- 
ion of,  480;  FitzGerald's  opin- 
ion of,  552. 

Crashaw,  Richard,  72. 

'Critical  Eeview,'  97-98. 

Croker,  John  Wilson,  Duke  of 
Wellington  sends  for,  95;  re- 
view of  Endymion,  121,  124, 
316,  317,  321;  review  of  Milnes's 
Poems,  372;  his  opinion  of 
Tennyson,  372,  515;  his  domi- 
nance as  a  critic,  450. 

Croly,  George,  120. 

Cunningham,  Allan,  259,  343. 

Day  Dream,  354,  392. 

Days  that  are  no  more,  266. 

Death  of  the  Old  Year,  300,  301. 

'Democratic  Review,'  396,  433, 
462. 

Deserted  House,  237,  400,   423. 

de  Vere,  Aubrey,  271,  379,  547. 

'Dial,'   457-459. 

Dickens,  Charles,   105,  491,  508. 

Dirge,  A,  237,  349. 

Disraeli,  Benjamin,  106,  107,  258, 
259,  508,  517,  578. 

Dixon,  Richard  Watson,  describes 
admiration  for  Tennyson  at  Ox- 
ford, 636;  quotes  Morris  on 
Tennyson,  638. 


INDEX 


647 


Dodsley,  Eobert,  204. 

Domett,  Alfred,  399. 

Donne,     William     Bodham,     letter 

from   Trench   about   the   Tenny- 

sons,  229 ;   letter  from  Spedding 

about    Alfred    Tennyson,    355 ; 

his    opinion    of    Browning,    551 ; 

letter   to   Barton  about  the  lau- 

reateship,  570. 
Dora,  354,  388,  430,  439. 
Doyle,   Sir   Francis   Hastings,  the 

Oxford  Union  debate,  156,  157; 

tributes  to  Hallam,  596,  608. 
Bream  of  Fair  Women,  284,  305, 

394,  405,  407,  410,  411,  412. 
Dryden,    John,    40,    71,    200,    373, 

569,  639. 
Duyckinck,  Evert  A.,  386. 
Dwight,   John   Sullivan,   383. 
Dyce,  Alexander,  531-532. 
Dying  Swan,  235,  348,  403. 

'Eclectic  Eeview,'  99,  541. 

Edgeworth,  Frank,  387. 

'  Edinburgh  Literary  Journal, ' 
184. 

'Edinburgh  Keview, '  its  position 
and  influence,  94-95,  98,  110, 
111,  124,  224,  469;  notes  an  in- 
difference to  poetry,  133,  134; 
on  Shelley  and  Keats,  145; 
on  Montgomery,  187,  193-195; 
Jeffrey  as  editor,  314;  first  ref- 
erence to  Tennyson,  365;  on  the 
Stanzas,  368;  places  Alford 
above  Tennyson,  372;  Shelley 
as  model  for  'Tennysonites, ' 
373;  Tennyson  expects  attack 
from,  389;  review  of  Poems  of 
1842,  436-437;  review  of  The 
Frincess,  547;  FitzGerald's  opin- 
ion of,  551 ;  mentioned,  130  n. 

Egerton,  Lord  Francis,  508. 


Eleanore,  303,  348,  407,  408, 

Elegiacs,  349. 

Eliot,  George,  551. 

Elliott,  Ebenezer,  480. 

Emerson,  K.  W.,  calls  upon  Words- 
worth, 214;  on  gifts,  253;  ad- 
miration for  Tennyson,  448,  457, 
459  n  ;  letter  from  Carlyle  about 
Tennyson,  504. 

'English  Eeview,'  98. 

English  War  Song,  234,  349. 

'Englishman's  Magazine,'  221, 
232,  233,  266,  282. 

Enoch  Arden,  88. 

Etty,  William,  189. 

'  Examiner, '  Tennyson 's  lines  in, 
9;  editors,  105;  Mrs.  Brown- 
ing's opinion  of,  106;  the  Prince 
Eegent,  115;  review  of  Poems 
of  1842,  338,  419,  421,  423,  440, 
541,  553,  621. 

Falconer,  Arabella,  573. 

Felton,  Prof.  C.  C,  review  of 
Poems  of  1842,  450-454,  457; 
on  imitations  of  Tennyson,  455, 
456. 

Fields,  .Tames  T.,  557. 

'Finden's   Serapbook,'   251. 

FitzGerald,  Edward,  preserved 
casual  utterances  of  Tennyson, 
6 ;  comparison  of  Frederick  and 
Alfred  Tennyson,  37,  551 ;  Ten- 
nyson did  not  consort  with  him 
at  Cambridge,  65;  his  opinion 
of  'The  Atlas,'  105;  letter  to 
Frederick  Tennyson  on  the  son- 
net, 219;  his  opinion  of  Croker'a 
article  on  Keats,  321;  friend- 
ship with  Tennyson  and  Sped- 
ding, 353-356,  389;  letter  from 
Tennyson  about  Poems  of  1842, 
385;  letters  to  Frederick  Tenny- 


648 


INDEX 


son  about  it,  387,  389,  420,  421, 
422;  letter  to  Pollock  about  it, 
438;  feared  lack  of  appreciation 
for  it,  439;  letter  from  Carlyle 
about  laureateship,  504;  letter 
to  Frederick  Tennyson  about 
The  Princess,  530,  550;  esti- 
mates of  English  writers,  551, 
552;   of  Tennyson,  551-553. 

Fletcher,  John,  371. 

Flower,  The,  88. 

Fonblanque,   Albany,    105. 

Forbes,  James  David,  511,  513. 

Fordyce,  Dr.  James,  537,  538. 

Foresters,  The,  212. 

Forget-me-not    (poem),  400,  409. 

'Forget  Me  Not'  (annual),  246, 
247,  253,  254,  256,  259,  261. 

Forster,  John,  joins  the  'Exam- 
iner, '  105 ;  review  of  Poems  of 
1842,  338,  419,  421,  440;  his 
opinion  of  Browning,  485,  486; 
sent  The  New  Timon  to  '  Punch, ' 
527;  review  of  The  Princess, 
541,  553 ;  review  of  In  Memo- 
riam,  621. 

'  Fortnightly   Keview, '   54. 

Fox,  William  Johnson,  288-289, 
369. 

Fragment,  A,  265. 

Fraser,  Hugh,  102. 

'  Fraser 's  Magazine, '  founded, 
102;  on  Prize  Poems,  86;  esti- 
mate of  contemporary  poetry, 
131,  133;  criticism  of  Campbell, 
140;  of  Montgomery,  185,  188; 
Gallery  of  Literary  Portraits, 
359 ;  review  of  LocTcsley  Hall, 
440;  of  The  Princess,  548;  of 
In  Memoriam,  624. 

'Friendship's  Offering,'  247,  248, 
253,  261,  266,  267. 

Fuller,    Margaret,    457-458,    459  n. 


Fytche,  Elizabeth,  2. 
Fytche,  Stephen,  45-46. 

Gardener's  Daughter,  354,  388, 
430,  439. 

'Gem,  The,'  261,  265,  268. 

'Gentleman's  Magazine,'  44,  180, 
183. 

George  IV  (then  Prince  Kegent), 
115. 

Gibbon,  Edward,  48. 

Gifford,  William,  101,  110,  112, 
360. 

Gilfillan,  George,  his  opinion  of 
Tennyson,  287;  review  of  Lochs- 
ley  Hall,  444, 

Gladstone,  W.  E.,  letters  from 
Hallam  about  Maurice,  73,  and 
Timbuctoo,  82;  Milnes's  charac- 
terization of,  155 ;  as  a  speaker, 
158;  Tennyson  and  the  laureate- 
ship,  513;  friendship  with  Hal- 
lam, 589,  590,  594;  thought 
Hallam  should  have  gone  to  Ox- 
ford, 592;  letters  from  Hallam 
about  Cambridge,  593 ;  notes  the 
ill  health  of  Hallam,  594;  trib- 
utes to  Hallam,  590,  592,  596, 
608-609,  612. 

God's  Denunciations  against  Pha- 
raoh-Hophra,  44. 

Godiva,  388,  431,  439,  448. 

Goethe,  67,  141. 

Golden  Days  of  Good  Haroun 
Alraschid,  230. 

Golden  Supper,  308. 

Goldsmith,  200. 

Goose,  The,  392. 

Gordon,  Mrs.  J.  T.,  402,  403. 

Gould,  Hannah  Flagg,  256. 

'  Graham 's  Magazine, '  462. 

Granville,  Lady  Jane,  573. 

Granville,  Lord,  573. 


INDEX 


649 


Grasshopper,  The,  235. 

Gray,  Thomas,  48,  53,  71,  340,  341, 

569. 
Greville,  C.  C.  F.,  166. 
Griffin,  Gerald,  222. 
Griswold,   Rufus   Wilmot,  estimate 

of  Tennyson,  460. 

Hadley,  Prof.  James,  review  of 
The  Princess,  556,  557. 

Hall,  Samuel  Carter,  250. 

Hallam,  Arthur  Henry,  birth,  and 
education  at  Eton,  589-590; 
meets  Gladstone,  589-590;  visits 
Italy,  591 ;  predicts  pilgrimages 
to  Tennyson 's  home,  4-5 ;  goes 
to  Cambridge,  591-593;  friend- 
ship with  Tennyson,  65,  332,  593, 
596;  competes  for  prize  poem, 
78;  reprints  Shelley's  Adonais, 
151;  letter  to  Gladstone  about 
Timbuctoo,  82;  his  opinion  of 
that  poem,  85 ;  visits  Tennyson 
at  Somersby,  281  ;  meets  Emily 
Tennyson,  596;  engaged  to  her, 
3,  281,  597-602;  joins  the 
'Apostles,'  76-77;  plans  to  edit 
poems  with  Tennyson,  76,  205; 
the  Oxford  Union  debate,  154- 
156,  159;  journey  with  Tenny- 
son to  the  Pyrenees,  90-92; 
sends  Poems  of  Two  Brothers 
to  Hunt,  206-207,  221;  effect 
upon  Hunt,  211-212;  letter  to 
Emily  Tennyson  about  Coler- 
idge, 215;  review  of  the  Poems 
of  1830,  222-224,  232,  236;  his 
indignation  at  Wilson's  review, 
238;  studies  law,  594;  letter  to 
Hunt  on  Tennyson 's  income, 
280;  letters  to  Trench  and  Hunt 
about  the  Poems  of  1832,  282- 
283;    letter    to    Tennyson    about 


them,  302,  401;  anxiety  about 
the  lines  To  Christopher  North, 
291;  asks  Tennyson  not  to  give 
up  The  Lover's  Tale,  307;  visits 
the  Rhine  with  Tennyson,  308- 
309;  his  influence  on  Tennyson, 
332;  objects  to  'madman'  as 
applied  to  Bonaparte,  414;  his 
aunt 's  legacy  to  Tennyson,  502 ; 
letter  about  The  Princess,  532; 
goes  to  continent,  594-595 ;  death 
and  burial,  595-596;  Tennyson's 
grief,  333,  356,  605;  Remains 
printed,  596;  Michael  Angelo's 
'bar,'  629-630;  tributes  to  his 
character,  605-615;  his  attain- 
ments and  promise,  609-611; 
prize  essays,  610-611;  In  Memo- 
riam,  616-617. 

Hallam,  Ellen,  595,  601,  604. 

Hallam,  Henry,  calls  Peel's  atten- 
tion to  Tennyson's  merits  and 
needs,  509-511;  correspondence 
with  Peel  and  Tennyson  about 
Tennyson's  pension,  508,  511- 
512;  on  Tennyson's  untidiness, 
517;  prints  his  son's  Remains, 
596;  meets  Emily  Tennyson, 
600;  attitude  towards  his  son's 
marriage,  601-603;  mentioned, 
589,  591. 

Hallam,  Henry  Fitzmaurice,  goes 
to  Cambridge,  592;   dies,  596. 

Hare,  Julius  Charles,  at  Cam- 
bridge, 67;  comparison  of 
Schelling,  Goethe,  and  Niebuhr, 
67;  opinion  of  Wordsworth,  68; 
asked  to  write  for  'The  Trib- 
ute,' 271;  reads  Tennyson's 
poems,  328. 

Harold,  524. 

Hastings,  Lady  Flora,  360. 

Hawkins,   Sir   John,   20. 


650 


INDEX 


Hawthorne,  Nathaniel,  256,  425. 

Haydon,    Benjamin    R.,    189. 

Hazlitt,  William,  145. 

Heath,  Charles,  251,  255,  258,  263, 
264,  307. 

Heber,  Reginald,  80. 

Hemans,  Mrs.,  259,  455. 

Heraud,  John  Abraham,  132. 

Herbert,  George,  72. 

Hero  to  Leander,  404,  415. 

Herriek,  Robert,   72. 

Hesperides,  301,  305,  350,  392,  400, 
407,  415. 

Hobhouse,  Lord,  573. 

Hogg,  James,  104,  259. 

Holland,  Lord,  573. 

Hoist,  Theodore  von,  189. 

Eoly  Grail,  The,  566. 

Homer,  209,  326,  358,  473. 

Hood,  Thomas,  222,  250,  261,  265, 
506. 

Horace,  14,  48. 

Home,  Richard  Hengist,  192,  369. 

Houghton,   Lord,   156,   261,  504. 

jffow  and  the  Why,  The,  234,  349. 

Howitt,  Mary,  544. 

Howitt,  William,  524. 

' Howitt 's  Journal,'  544. 

Hume,  David,  48. 

Hunt,  John,  105. 

Hunt,  J.  H.  Leigh,  starts  the 
'Literary  Examiner,'  105;  re- 
flections on  the  Prince  Regent, 
115;  'Blackwood's'  attacks 
him,  114-118;  Loekhart's  review 
of  his  Lord  Byron,  119;  Croker 
calls  Keats  a  copyist  of  Hunt, 
122,  123;  starts  'The  Tatler,' 
206;  reviews  Poems  of  1830, 
206,  207,  211-213,  215,  221,  231, 
237;  on  Charles  Tennyson,  216; 
criticises  Hallam,  223;  Wilson 
on,  232,  236,   296;   letters  from 


Hallam,  206,  207,  280,  283;  edi- 
tor of  'Monthly  Repository,' 
369;  his  Palfrey,  390;  reviews 
Poems  of  1842,  427,  434-436, 
515;  his  Abou  ben  Adhem,  460; 
on  Kemble,  515;  the  laureate- 
ship,  576-577,  580,  583;  men- 
tioned, 129,  139,  222,  364,  371, 
466,  482. 

Hurst,  Thomas,  248,  249. 

Hutton,  Richard  Holt,  106. 

Idylls  of  the  King,  430,  491. 

In  Early   Youth  I  Lost  my  Sire, 

52. 
In  Memoriam,   92,   363,   374,   456, 

495,  551,  566,  584,  585,  589,  596, 

608,  614,  616-640. 
In  the  Gloomy  Night,  348. 
I7i  the  Valley  of  Cauteretz,  92. 
'Iris,  The,'  250. 
Irving,  Washington,  256. 
Isabel,  237,  348. 

Jackson,  Messrs.,  41,  46,  60. 

Jeffrey,  Francis,  editor  of  'Edin- 
burgh,' 95;  his  supremacy  in 
criticism,  123,  314;  not  resent- 
ful, 469,  470;  had  hosts  of 
friends,  112;  Byron  resents  his 
criticism  of  Keats,  123;  at- 
tacked by  Byron,  470;  said 
Byron  had  no  successor,  129; 
'Lake  School,'  298;  on  Pollok, 
178;  on  Joanna  Baillie,  471; 
succeeded  by  Napier,  314. 

Jerdan,  William,  editor  of  'Lit- 
erary Gazette,'  103,  425;  his 
character  as  a  critic,  294-296, 
425;  Wilson  on,  104;  Southey 
on,  104,  295-296;  review  of 
Lamb,  104,  295-297;  'Baa- 
Lamb'  school,  297-298;    reviews 


INDEX 


651 


Poems  of  1830,  296-299 ;  reviews 
Poems  of  1842,  383-384;  in 
'Fraser's'  Gallery,  359;  Auto- 
iiography,  425. 

Jesse,  Eichard,  603. 

Jesse,  William,   603. 

Johnson,  Dr.  Samuel,  19,  20,  44, 
113,  627. 

Jones,  Sir  William,  48. 

Juvenal,  48. 

Kate,  392. 

Keats,  John,  Tennyson  on  Milnes  's 
Life  of,  8,  10,  11;  a  disciple  of 
Hunt,  123;  position  as  a  poet, 
161,  162,  225,  316-318,  360,  382, 
451,  497,  498;  Lockhart's  attack 
in  'Blackwood,'  114-120,  122, 
123,  299,  315,  318,  324;  Lock- 
hart  on  Endymion  in  '  Quar- 
terly,'  119;  Croker  on  Endymion 
in  'Quarterly,'  121-123,  321; 
Jeffrey  on  Endymion,  123-124; 
Lockhart  again  attacks  Keats 
in  'Quarterly,'  316-319;  St. 
Agnes,  367,  381;  Bulwer  on 
Keats,  304,  521,  523;  FitzGer- 
ald  on,  552;  mentioned,  128, 
138,  145,  151,  206,  211,  223, 
224,  371,  373,  404. 

Keble,  .John,  421. 

'Keepsake,'  251,  253,  255,  256, 
263,  269,  271,  366,  379. 

'Keepsake  Franqais, '   251. 

Kemble,  Fanny,  receives  Poems  of 
1830  from  her  brother,  76;  on 
English  newspaper  writers,  109; 
on  Poems  of  1832,  290;  enthu- 
siasm for  Tennyson,  328-329, 
396;  on  Poems  of  1842,  396,  397, 
419,  433;  De  Montfort,  471; 
letter  to  Egerton  about  laureate- 
ship,  508,  509 ;  death  of  Hallam, 


606;  opinion  of  Hallam,  615; 
mentioned,  488. 

Kemble,  John  Mitchell,  on  the 
'  Apostles, '  70,  84 ;  on  the  Poems 
of  1830,  76;  letters  from  Trench 
on  the  'Athenaeum,'  84;  Span- 
ish expedition,  90-91 ;  letter  to 
his  sister  about  Coleridge,  215; 
letter  to  Trench  on  the  Poems 
of  1832,  283;  intimacy  with 
Tennyson,  396;  Be  Montfort, 
471;  Lamb's  opinion  of,  515; 
on  death  of  Hallam,  606. 

Kinglake,  Alexander  William,  65, 
372. 

Kingsley,  Charles,  440,  508,  548. 

'  Knickerbocker  Magazine, '  277, 
278,  405. 

Knowles,  James  Sheridan,  482, 
505,  506,  521. 

Kraken,  The,  235,  348. 

Lady  Clara  Vere  de  Vere,  392,  413, 
638. 

Lady  of  Shalott,  284,  289,  298, 
348,  394,  407,  408,  462,  495. 

Laing,  Major  A.  G.,  79. 

Lake,  John,  292-294. 

Lamb,  Charles,  104,  161,  222,  257, 
295-297,  356. 

Landon,  Letitia  E.,  Ill,  185,  259. 

Landor,  Walter  Savage,  77,  129, 
139,  258,  259,  270,  378. 

Lang,  Andrew,  55,  406. 

Levett,  Robert,   627. 

Lewis,  George  Cornwall,  570,  571. 

'Literary  Chronicle,'  43. 

'  Literary  Examiner, '  see  '  Exam- 
iner. ' 

'Literary  Gazette,'  started,  103; 
its  position  and  influence,  104, 
132,  294;  on  Taylor,  169;  on 
Montgomery,   178-180;    on   'The 


652 


INDEX 


Keepsake,'  252;  on  'The  Gem,' 
268;  on  the  Poems  of  1832,  294- 
299;  on  the  Poems  of  1842,  382, 
383,  424-426;  on  In  Memoriam, 
618;   mentioned,  62,  197,  522. 

'Literary  Souvenir,'  248,  249,  256, 

'Literary  Squabbles,'  528. 

Lockhart,  John  Gibson,  editor  of 
'Quarterly,'  110;  letter  to  Black- 
wood about  it,  95;  his  influence, 
95,  96,  124,  324-326,  328-330, 
449,  451,  522,  524;  his  character, 
111-113,  118,  119,  310,  318,  468; 
letters  from  Scott  on  newspaper 
work,  108,  and  on  the  Annuals, 
254;  on  Taylor,  165;  does  not 
review  Bulwer,  111 ;  on  The 
Cockney  School  of  Poetry,  114- 
120;  on  Keats,  296,  299,  316- 
319;  review  of  Poems  of  1832, 
310-324,  325,  326,  328-330,  450; 
its  effect  upon  Tennyson,  405- 
413,  466;  in  'Eraser's'  Gallery, 
359 ;  opens  '  Quarterly '  to  friend- 
ly review  of  Poems  of  1842, 
427,  428,  432,  433,  515;  men- 
tioned, 259,  465. 

Locksley  Hall,  374,  400,  424,  430, 
440,  442,  444,  445,  448,  454, 
462,  500,  505,  638. 

'London  Chronicle,'  62,  121. 

'London  Magazine,'  101. 

'London  Eeview,'   98,   346,  434. 

Longfellow,  557-558  n. 

Lost  Hope,  234. 

Lotus  Eaters,  284,  348,  394,  397, 
407,  410,  462. 

Love,  Pride,  and  For  get  fulness, 
234. 

Love  Thou  Thy  Land,  392. 

Lover's  Tale,  307,  414. 

Lowell,  J.  R.,  copies  Tennyson's 
early    poems,    446 ;    the    Poem^ 


of  1842,  386;  Felton's  opinion 
of,  455;  on  Bulwer,  523;  on 
The  Princess,  559-562. 

Lucretius,  48. 

Lushington,  Edmund,  388,  502. 

Lushington,  Henry,  533. 

Lytton,  Baron,  see  Bulwer. 

Lytton,  Earl  of,  524. 

Macaulay,  on  Montgomery,  185, 
187,  193-199;  on  Tennyson,  491, 
508;  on  Rogers,  573,  574;  Mont- 
gomery on,  190,  196;  Maunder 
on,  196-199;  mentioned,  64,  80, 
386,  391,  487,  488,  507. 

Mackay,  Charles,  571. 

Mackenzie,  Henry,  311,  312,  314. 

Mackintosh,  Sir  James,  259. 

Maclise,  Daniel,  189. 

Macmillan,  Messrs.,  330. 

Macready,  W.  C,  170,  171. 

Maginn,  William,  102,  120. 

Manning,  Cardinal,  156,  159. 

Maplethorpe,  34. 

Mariana,  237,  347,  494,  499,  500, 
520. 

Mariana  in  the  South,  394,  407, 
408. 

Martial,  48. 

Martin,  John,  189. 

Mason,  William,  48. 

'Massachusetts  Quarterly  Review,' 
559. 

Maud,  273-275,  278,  444,  456,  551, 
637. 

Maunder,  Samuel,  196,  197. 

Maurice,  Frederick  Denison,  64, 
73,  83,  84. 

May  Queen,  284,  348,  392,  420. 

Me  my  own  fate  to  lasting  sorrow, 
267. 

Meadows,  Kenny,  264. 


INDEX 


653 


Medwin,   Thomas,  9. 

Meleager,   399. 

Merivale,  Charles,  65,  69,  279,  280, 
282. 

Merivale,  John   H.,  69. 

Mermmd,  235,  349,  403. 

Merman,  235,  349,  403. 

Michael  Angelo's  'bar,'  630. 

Mill,  John  Stuart,  review  of 
Tennyson,  342,  346-351,  364, 
434;  its  effect  upon  Tennyson, 
414;  on  the  reviews  of  Tenny- 
son in  'Blackwood's'  and  the 
'Quarterly,'  352,  353;  on  Ster- 
ling, 614. 

Miller's  Daughter,  284,  300,  301, 
394,  396,  397,  407,  409. 

Milman,  Henry  Hart,  80,  81,  259. 

Milman,  Mrs.,  329. 

Milnes,   R.   M.,   with   Tennyson   at 
Cambridge,      65;      letter      from 
Blakesley    about    Tennyson,    16, 
17;  competes  for  prize  poem,  78; 
on   Timb'uctoo,  82;    The  Oxford 
Union     Debate,     154-156,     159; 
life    of    Keats,    8;    letter    from 
Mont€ith  about  Poems  of  1830, 
223;   asks  for  'The  Gem,'  268; 
asks     Tennyson     to     write     for 
'The  Tribute,'  271,  272;  'Quar- 
terly'   reviews   his   Poems,   372, 
373,    455;    letters    to    de    Vere 
about      Tennyson,      379;      from 
Trench    about    him,    380;    from 
Sumner  about  him,  448;  reviews 
Poems    of    1842,    427,    434;    the 
laureateship,   504-506,   509,   510, 
512,  572;    Hallam's   opinion   of, 
510;  his  opinion  of  Hallam,  605, 
606. 
Milton,    39,    40,    48,    55,    59,    71, 
132,  133,  141,  177,  186,  208,  210, 
221,  223,  373,  473,  532,  537,  538. 


Mitford,   Mary   R.,   222,   259,   445, 
499,  531,  577. 

Moir,    David    Macbeth,    364,    466, 
482. 

Moliere,  142. 

Monteith,  Robert,  223. 

Montgomery,  James,  186,  270. 

Montgomery,  Robert,  178,  179,  181- 
203,   259,   391,   480. 

'Monthly      Repository,'      287-289, 
369. 

'Monthly  Review,'  97,  98,  184-185. 

Moore,   Thomas,  44,  48,   129,   139, 
142,  186,  259,  270,  359,  480,  573. 

More,  Hannah,  256. 

'Morning  Post,'  115. 

Morpeth,  Lord,  266. 

Morris,  William,  552,  636-638. 

Morte  d' Arthur,  378,  388,  432,  439, 
462. 

Motherwell,  WUliam,  222,  482. 

Moxon,  Edward,  publishes  'Eng- 
lishman's Magazine,'  221,  222, 
282;  Tennyson  and  that  maga- 
zine, 282;  Poems  of  1832,  307, 
357,  358;  Poems  of  1842,  387, 
417,  453,  500,  501;  In  Memo- 
riam,  616,  617;  on  Tennyson's 
sensitiveness  to  criticism,  400; 
loses  on  all  poets  but  Tennyson, 
500;  Moxon  and  Taylor,  164- 
166,  357:  and  Bro^^-ning,  166, 
357;  and  Lamb,  296. 
Mudie,  Messrs.,  617. 
Murray,  John,   96,   106,   108,   124, 

164,  310,  311. 
Murray,  Lindley,  628. 
My  Early  Love,  277. 

Nadir  Shah,  49. 

Napier,  Macvey,  109,  194,  436. 

Napoleon,  143,  414. 


654 


INDEX 


National  Song,  212,  234,  349. 

'New  Englander, '  556. 

'New    London    Literary    Gazette,' 

399. 
'New    Monthly     Magazine,'     102, 

111,  131,  140,  224,  225,  304,  485. 
New    Timon   a7id   the   Poets,   525- 

526,  629. 
New  Year's  Eve,  301,  348. 
Niebuhr,  B.  G.,  67. 
No  More,  265. 
North,     Christopher,    see    Wilson, 

John, 
'North    American    Review,'    455, 

456,  523. 
'North  British  Eeview,'  579. 
Northampton,     Marquis     of,     270, 

271. 
'Notes  and  Queries,'  4,  60,  61. 
Nothing  Will  Die,  210,  235. 

0   Darling   Boom,   290,    291,    305, 

309,  321,  407,  423,  520. 
Oalc  of  the  North,  43. 
O'Connell,  Daniel,  517. 
Ode  on  the  Death  of  the  DuTce  of 

Wellington,  456. 
Ode  to  Memory,  35,  237,  430,  494, 
CEnone,    284,    298,    301,    305,    342, 

348,  394,  407,  410,  448,  461,  462, 

498. 
Of  old  sat  Freedom  on  the  Heights, 

392. 
Oldham,  John  R.,   156, 
Opie,  Mrs.,  247. 
Oriana,  223,  230,  237,  494. 
Ossian,  48. 
Ovid,   48. 

Owl,  The,  235,  289,  349,  403, 
'  Oxford      University      Magazine, ' 

327. 

Page,  Mrs.,  264. 


Palace  of  Art,  284,  302,  304,  348, 
394,  407,  410-412,  432, 

Palgrave,  Francis  Turner,  14. 

Panizzi,  Sir  Anthony,  591. 

Park,  Mungo,  79. 

Patmore,  Coventry,  619. 

Peel,  Sir  Robert,  502,  505,  506, 
508-513,  517. 

Persia,  58. 

Phrenology,  51. 

Poe,  Edgar  Allan,  scorns  charge 
of  affectation  against  Tenny- 
son, 338;  proclaims  Tennyson's 
superiority  as  poet,  461-462, 
561. 

Poems  hy  Two  Brothers,  41-62, 
68,  215. 

Poems  chiefly  Lyrical  (the  1830 
Volume),  35,  56,  76,  205-230, 
281,  284,  288,  299,  300,  303,  346- 

351,  363,  401-404,  457,  477;  and 
see  Wilson. 

Poems  of  1832,  279-309,  325,  346- 

352,  358,  363,  398,  401,  406- 
414,  457,  465,  477,  520;  and 
see  Lockhart,  and  Wilson. 

Poems  of  1842,  163,  368,  377-415, 

416-464,  497-501,  515,  550,  553. 
Poet's  Mind,  234,  237,  403. 
Pollock,  Sir  Frederick,  438,  551. 
Pollok,  Robert,  177,  178. 
Pope,  Alexander,  36,  55,  71,  124, 

200,  373,  529,  628,  636. 
Praed,    Winthrop    Mackworth,    64, 

80. 
Princess,   The,   65,   266,  412,   417, 

456,  462,  493,  495,  530-567,  623, 

624,  638. 
Pringle,  Thomas,  101. 
Procter,   Bryan   Waller,    259,   364, 

466,  508,  571. 
'Prolusiones   Academicse,'   78. 
Pye,  Henry  James,  569. 


INDEX 


655 


'Quarterly  Review,'  its  dating  ir- 
regular, 121;  its  position  and 
influence,  94,  95,  110,  328,  342, 
449,  451,  455;  Gifford  as  editor, 
101,  110;  Lockhart  as  editor, 
107,  110;  silence  towards  Bul- 
wer  and  other  rising  authors, 
110,  111;  on  Keats,  119,  121- 
123,  373;  on  Taylor,  164,  165; 
on  Montgomery,  186;  on  Mihies, 
372,  455 ;  attacks  Tennyson,  314- 
324,  326-330,  342,  351,  352,  373, 
380,  452,  466,  468;  its  effect 
upon  Tennyson,  404-413;  Ster- 
ling's review  of  the  Poems  of 
1842,   427-434,   515. 

Racine,  48. 

Radcliffe,  Mrs.,  48. 

Ra^Tisley,  Canon,  3. 

Eecollections  of  Arabian  Nights, 
212,  223,  237,  348. 

Reid,  T.  Wemyss,  504. 

Relfe,  Lupton,  247. 

'Representative,  The,'  107. 

Robertson,  Frederick  William, 
631,   632. 

Robinson,   Henry   Crabb,    161. 

Robinson,  Joseph  O.,  248,  249. 

Rogers,  Samuel,  contributor  to 
Annuals,  259;  on  Tennyson,  302, 
511-514;  in  'Eraser's'  Gallery, 
359 ;  friends  write  cold  reviews, 
427;  Ilallam  refers  Peel  to  him, 
510;  Rassell  asks  about  Tenny- 
son, 584;  laureateship  offered  to 
him,  572,  573,  575,  580;  Macau- 
lay  and  others  on,  573;  as  a 
poet,  572-574;  his  character, 
573,  574;  mentioned,  129,  139, 
500. 

Bosalind,  300,  392. 


Rossetti,  William  M.,  9,  549,  550, 

552. 
Rousseau,  48. 
Rowe,  Nicholas,  569. 
Ruskin,  261. 

Russell,  Lord  John,  570,  584,  587. 
Russell,  Mrs.  Matthew,  308. 

St.  Agnes,  269,  366,  367,  381,  392, 
43]. 

St.  Simeon  Stylites,  388,  400,  431, 
434,  439. 

SaUust,  48. 

'  Sartain  's  Union  Magazine, '   462. 

Schelling,  67. 

Scott,  Walter,  influences  Tenny- 
son, 36;  letters  to  Murray  and 
Lockhart  on  newspaper  work, 
108;  letter  to  Lockhart  about 
the  Annuals,  254;  contributes  to 
them,  258,  259;  editorship  of 
'Keepsake'  offered  to  him,  263; 
in  *  Fraser  's '  Gallery,  359 ;  on 
Joanna  Baillie,  471,  472 ;  Wilson 
on,  480,  490,  492;  refuses  lau- 
reateship, 569;  his  estimate  of 
Rogers,  573;  mentioned,  48,  53, 
128,  129. 

Scott,  William  Bell,  264. 

Sea  Fairies,  235. 

Sellwood,  Louise,  216. 

Settle,  Elkanah,  200. 

Shadwell,  Thomas,  569. 

Shakespeare,  9,  10,  15,  19,  48,  71, 
133,  209,  221,  264,  268,  358,  471- 
473,  489,  539,  549,  627. 

Shall  the  Hag  Evil  Die  with  Child, 
234. 

Shelley,  P.  B.,  Adonais  reprinted 
by  the  'Apostles,'  151,  152; 
attacked  by  'Blackwood's,'  117; 
monody  on  Keats,  122;  position 
and   influence,   150-153,   159-161, 


656 


INDEX 


421;  influence  on  Tennyson,  87; 
Browning  asks  for  his  works, 
153,  154;  The  Oxford  Un- 
ion debate,  154-159;  Stopford 
Brooke  on,  56;  Swinburne  on, 
174;  Hunt  on,  223;  Bulwer  on, 
304,  305;  Forster  on,  485;  Fitz- 
Gerald  on,  552;  the  'Edin- 
burgh' on,  373;  mentioned,  128, 
138,  145,  224,  354,  371,  484, 

Shenstone,  William,  155. 

Siddons,  Mrs.,  471. 

Sigourney,   Mrs.,   256. 

Simpkin,  Marshall,  Messrs.,  41. 

-Sir  Galahad,  439,  638, 

Sisters,  The,  348. 

SMpping  Bope,   The,  420,  459. 

Sleeping  Beauty,  237,  348,  392, 
462,  500, 

Smedley,  Edward,  270. 

Smith,   Horace,   259. 

'  Southern  Literary  Messenger, ' 
449,  450,  455. 

Southey,  Mrs.,  579. 

Southey,  Eobert,  friend  of  Taylor, 
173;  on  the  Annuals,  254,  255; 
contributor  to  them,  270;  on 
Taylor,  164;  on  Montgomery, 
191;  on  Jerdan,  295,  297;  lau- 
reate, 508,  569,  581;  Rogers 
superior  to,  573;  Taylor  on,  104; 
Coleridge  on,  214;  Tennyson  on, 
272;  Jerdan  on,  296;  Wilson  on, 
480,  492;  mentioned,  129,  139, 
579. 

'Spectator,  The,'  106,  225,  239, 
240,  302,  419. 

Spedding,  James,  with  Tennyson 
at  Cambridge,  65 ;  Charles 
Tennyson's  Poems,  217;  asked 
to  write  for  '  The  Tribute, '  271 ; 
letter  from  Tennyson  about 
Mill's   review,    342;    FitzGerald 


and  Tennyson  visit  him  at  Mire- 
house,  353-355 ;  urges  Tennyson 
to  visit  Wordsworth,  354;  Tenny- 
son visits  him  in  London,  374; 
letter  on  Tennyson's  movements, 
376;  goes  to  America,  388,  436; 
reviews  Poems  of  1842,  436,  437, 
553;  on  Hallam,  607,  613;  Fitz- 
Gerald on  Spedding,  389 ;  char- 
acter, 553,  607. 

Spedding,  John,  353,  354. 

Spenser,  48,  71. 

Spirit  Haunts  the  Year's  last 
Hours,  348. 

Spring-Eice,  Stephen,  330. 

Stanley,  Arthur,  328. 

Stanley,  Lord,   517. 

Stansas,  273,  366,  368. 

Stephen,  Leslie,  74. 

Sterling,  John,  at  Cambridge,  64; 
influence  on  the  'Apostles,'  90; 
editor  of  'Athenaeum,'  83;  let- 
ter to  Trench  on  St.  Agnes,  381; 
letter  to  Trench  comparing 
Tennyson  and  Keats,  382;  re- 
view of  Poems  of  1842,  427-435; 
on  Taylor,  174;  Carlyle's  life 
of,  90,  428;  his  character  and 
reputation,  428,  429,  483;  Mill's 
opinion  of,  614;  poems  by 
'Archaeus, '  482,  483;  mentioned, 
364,  374. 

Stone,  Frank,  264. 

Suckling,  Sir  John,  72. 

Suetonius,  48. 

Sumner,  Charles,  448. 

'Sunday  Mercury,'   43. 

Sunday  Mots,  51. 

Sunderland,  Thomas,  154-159. 

Swinburne,  174,  552. 

Tacitus,  48. 
Taine,  H,  A.,  444. 


INDEX 


657 


'Tait's  Edinburgh  Magazine,'  303, 
444,  463,  492,  619,  624,  629. 

Talfourd,  Sir  Thomas  N.,  482. 

Talking  Oal;  The,  420,  432-434, 
439. 

'Tatler,  The,'  206,  211. 

Taylor,  Henry,  on  Southey  and 
the  "Literary  Gazette,'  104;  the 
'Edinburgh'  reviews  Artevelde, 
133;  on  Byron  and  Wordsworth, 
148,  149;  on  Shelley,  174;  on 
Burns,  220;  on  Charles  Tenny- 
son, 270;  on  G.  C.  Lewis,  570, 
571;  Tennyson  and  Taylor,  168; 
influence  of  Tennyson,  371,  372; 
Taylor's  writings,  164-173,  390; 
his  position  and  influence,  173- 
176;  friend  of  Southey  and 
Wordsworth,  173  ;  Hallam  refers 
Peel  to,  510;  the  laureateship, 
570;  Swinburne  on  Taylor,  174; 
Moxon  on,  357,  500;  Wilson  on, 
482;  Macaulay  on,  507. 

Tennyson,  Alfred,  ancestry,  birth, 
relatives,  2-4,  21-25;  the  disin- 
heritance of  his  father,  22-24; 
boyhood  and  youth,  6,  25-36; 
the  school  at  Louth,  25-28; 
Alfred  and  Charles  insepara- 
ble, 27,  28;  lines  addressed  to 
Charles,  8-11;  education  at 
home,  28-30;  aversion  to  pub- 
licity, 6-21 ;  use  of  tobacco,  16- 
17;  carelessness  in  dress,  17,  31; 
early  poetical  tastes,  36,  37,  48, 
49,  52,  55,  87;  early  efforts  in 
verse,  24,  25,  36,  37;  Poems  by 
Two  Brothers,  see  that  head; 
Alfred  compared  with  Charles, 
36,  214,  215,  with  Frederick, 
37;  goes  to  Cambridge,  63;  his 
friends  there,  64,  65;  intimacy 
with  Hallam,  65,  332,  593,  596; 


'The  Apostles,'  69-84,  90,  301; 
impression  made  by  Tennyson, 
75-77;  Timhuctoo,  see  that 
head;  plans  to  edit  poems  with 
Hallam,  76,  205;  Shelley's 
Adonais  reprinted,  151-153;  the 
Oxford  Union  Debate,  154-159; 
writes  poems,  281 ;  Poems  chiefly 
Lyrical,  see  that  head;  trip  to 
Pyrenees,  90-93;  leaves  univer- 
sity, 279;  illness  and  death  of 
his  father,  279,  280;  contribu- 
tor to  the  Annuals,  243,  244, 
265-278,  332,  379;  adopts  lit- 
erary career,  280;  at  Somersby, 
280,  352,  353;  Hallam  visits 
him,  281,  and  predicts  pilgrim- 
ages there,  4,  5;  Moxon  secures 
a  poem  for  '  The  Englishman ' 
and  agrees  to  publish  a  pro- 
jected volume  of  poems,  281, 
282 ;  excursion  up  the  Ehine, 
308,  309,  and  see  0  Darling 
Boom;  the  Poems  of  1832,  see 
that  head;  sensitiveness  to  criti- 
cism, 334-336,  341,  342,  378,  389, 
401,  468,  516;  absurd  criticism 
of,  336 ;  affectation  in  employing 
unusual  words,  336-339 ;  obscu- 
rity, 339;  lack  of  thought,  339, 
340,  366;  Tennyson  ceases  to 
publish,  331;  the  ten  years'  si- 
lence, 325-377;  death  of  Hallam, 
595,  596;  Tennyson's  grief,  333, 
356,  605;  Hallam 's  influence  on 
Tennyson,  332;  residence  at 
High  Beech,  374;  at  Tunbridge 
Wells,  375;  at  Boxley,  375;  at 
Cheltenham,  377;  joins  the  Ster- 
ling Club,  374;  visits  Spedding 
at  Mirehouse,  353-355,  at  Lin- 
coln's Inn,  374;  would  not  visit 
Wordsworth,  354;  intimacy  with 


658 


INDEX 


FitzGerald,  353,  with  Hartley 
Coleridge,  354;  country  excur- 
sions, 375-377;  Frederick  advises 
him  to  publish,  332 ;  demand  for 
new  editions,  384-387;  Poems  of 
1842,  see  that  head;  pecuniary 
affairs  and  pension,  501-516; 
The  Princess,  see  that  head; 
poet  laureate,  568-588;  mar- 
riage, 589;  In  Memoriam,  see 
that  head;  comparison  with 
Alford,  364,  365;  with  Byron, 
S3;  with  Crabbe,  44;  with 
Keats,  162;  with  Taylor,  168; 
Campbell 's  influence,  49,  53 ; 
friend  of  Kemble,  396;  altera- 
tions iu  his  poems,  393-414, 
565;     imitators,     369-372,     455, 

456,  490;  his  national  feeling, 
213;  reputation,  241,  242,  305- 
307,  333,  359-373,  384,  416,  418, 
442,  497-499,  546,  635-640; 
Tennyson 's  opinion  of  the 
Prince  Consort,  21 ;  of  Jane 
Austen,  15;  of  Byron,  339;  of 
Medwin's  Byron,  9;  of  Milnes's 
Keats,  8-11;  of  Southey,  272; 
of  Charles  Tennyson  Turner, 
220,  221;  of  Wordsworth,  221, 
272;  Browning's  opinion  of 
Tennyson,  37,  404,  405,  413; 
Bulwer's,  322,  519-529,  629; 
Mrs.  Cameron's,  14;  Carlyle's, 
17,  504,  551;  S.  T.  Coleridge's, 
214,  215,  343-345;  Croker's, 
372,  515;  Cunningham's,  343; 
Dixon's,    636;    Emerson's,    448, 

457,  459  m;  FitzGerald 's,  37, 
356,  551-553;  Gilfillan's,  287; 
Gladstone's,  513;  Griswold's, 
460;  A.  H.  Hallam's,  28,  213; 
H.  Hallam's,  509-511,  517; 
Fanny  Kemble 's,  328,  329,  396; 


Lockhart's,  see  that  head;  Ma- 
caulay's,  491,  508;  Mill's,  342, 
346-352,  364,  434;  Morris's, 
638;  Moxon's,  357,  400,  500; 
Poe's,  338,  461,  462,  561; 
Eogers's,  302,  511-514;  Sped- 
ding's,  355,  376;  Taylor's,  371, 
372;  George  Tennyson's,  25; 
George  Clayton  Tennyson's,  25; 
Trench's,  229,  382;  Wilson's, 
see  that  head;  Wordsworth's, 
213,  214.  See  also  the  titles  of 
individual  poems. 

Tennyson,  Charles  (brother),  see 
Turner,   C.  T. 

Tennyson,  Charles   (uncle),  22. 

Tennyson,  Edward  (brother),  267. 

Tennyson,  Elizabeth  Fytche 
(mother),  4. 

Tennyson,  Emily  (sister),  meets 
Hallam,  596;  engaged  to  him, 
281,  597,  599-604,  606;  letter 
from  him  about  Charles,  215; 
death  of  Hallam,  3,  603,  604. 

Tennyson,  Frederick  (brother),  at 
Cambridge,  63;  Merivale  ad- 
vises his  son  to  meet,  69; 
Poems  by  Two  Brothers,  43,  44, 
56;  letters  from  FitzGerald  on 
the  sonnet,  219;  on  the  Poems 
of  1842,  387,  389,  421;  on  The 
Princess,  530,  550;  asked  to 
write  for  'The  Tribute,'  272; 
advises  Alfred  to  publish,  332; 
FitzGerald 's  estimate  of,  37, 
551;  the  Brownings'  estimate 
of,  221;  on  Hallam,  608;  men- 
tioned   2,  3. 

Tennyson,  George  (grandfather), 
21,  22,  24,  25. 

Tennyson,  George  Clayton  (fath- 
er), marriage  and  children,  2; 
disinherited,     22-24;      view     of 


INDEX 


659 


Alfred's  genius,  25;  instructs 
his  children,  28;  his  library,  29; 
writes  verses,  36;  friend  of 
Merivale,  69;  death,  280. 

Tennyson,  Mary  (sister),  601. 

Terence,  48. 

Thackeray,  W.  M.,  at  Cambridge, 
65;  on  Brookfield,  64;  contribu- 
tor to  the  'Times,'  106;  Fen- 
dennis,  262;  his  early  writings, 
491,   508;    The  Newcomes,   498. 

There  are  three  Things  which  fill 
my  Heart,  267. 

Thirlwall,  Connop,  67,  606. 

Thomson,  James,  36. 

Thompson,  W.  H.,  414,  421,  551. 

Ticknor,  William  D.,  254,  558. 

Timluctoo,  77,  78,  80-87. 

'Times,  The,'  106,  108,  297,  568, 
618,  625,  626,  629,  631,  633. 

To  a  Lark,  214. 

To  after  reading  a  Life  ond 

Letters,  8. 

To  Christopher  North,  240,  289- 
292,  294,  305,  314-316,  320,  321, 
350,  351,  402,  407,  423,  450,  465, 
468,  473,  476,  479-481,  485-487, 
496. 

Trench,  E.  C,  at  Cambridge  with 
Tennyson,  65,  281 ;  letter  from 
Kemble  about  the  Tennysons, 
76;  letters  to  Kemble  about  the 
'Athenffium,'  84;  the  Spanish 
expedition,  90,  91;  letter  from 
Blakesley  about  the  Oxford 
Union  debate,  155,  156;  letter 
from  Sterling  about  Taylor, 
174;  on  Charles  and  Alfred 
Tennyson,  229;  asked  to  write 
for  'The  Tribute,'  271;  letters 
from  Hallam  and  Kemble  on  the 
Poems  of  1832,  282,  283;  letter 
to  Milnes  about  Tennyson,  380; 


letters  from  Sterling  about  St. 
Agnes,  381;  about  Tennyson  and 
Keats,  382;  his  Poems  and 
Genoveva,  390,  391;  his  Justin 
Martyr,  466;  Wilson  on,  482; 
Moxon  on,  500;  mentioned,  364, 
387,  473,  474,  480. 

'Tribute,  The,'  270,  273,  277,  278, 
366,  368,  379,  380. 

Tupper,  Martin  Farquhar,  203, 
204. 

Turner,  Charles  Tennyson,  Poem 
to,  by  Alfred,  8;  he  and  Alfred 
inseparable,  27,  28;  Poems  hy 
Two  Brothers,  41,  42,  51,  53; 
goes  to  Cambridge,  63 ;  his 
choice  of  a  profession,  24,  216; 
compared  with  Alfred,  36,  214, 
215;  Kemble  writes  to  Trench 
about  his  Sonnets,  76;  Sonnets 
published,  215-220;  writes  for 
'The  Tribute,'  272;  inherits 
uncle's  property  and  changes 
name,  216,  272;  Hunt  on,  211, 
212;  Hallam  on,  214;  Coler- 
idge on,  214,  215;  Merivale  on, 
279;  Spedding  on,  217,  218; 
Alfred  on,  220,  221;  Taylor  on, 
221;  the  Brownings  on,  221; 
Trench  on,  229;  mentioned,  2. 

Turner,  Samuel,  24,  216. 

Turner,  Sharon,  191,  192. 

Two  Voices,  432,  433,  435,  439, 
605. 

Ulysses,   388,   431,   439,   498,   505. 

Vale  of  Bones,  57. 

Van  Dyke,  Henry,  60. 

Venables,    George    Stovin,    64,    72, 

78. 
Vere,  Aubrey,  see  de  Vere. 


660 


INDEX 


Vergil,  48,  209. 
Vision  of  Sin,  439. 

Walking  to  the  Mail,  388. 

Waller,  Edmund,  72. 

Walters,  John  Cuming,  27,  31. 

Warton,  Thomas,  569. 

Watts,  Alaric  Alex.,  185,  248,  249, 
262. 

We  are  Free,  234. 

Wellington,  Duke  of,  95,  108,  517. 

'  Westminster  Eeview, '  on  Mont- 
gomery, 186 ;  on  the  Poems  of 
1830,  207-212,  223,  228,  232,  233, 
235,  236,  326;  on  the  Poems 
of  1842,  427,  434;  on  The  Prin- 
cess, 624;  mentioned,  99,  346, 
434. 

Wheeler,  Charles  S.,  458. 

Whewell,  William,  271. 

Whipple,   Edwin   Percy,   460,   461. 

Whittier,  J.  G.,  256. 

Who  can  say,  349. 

Will  Waterproof's  Lyrical  Mono- 
logue, 8,  460. 

Willis,  N.  P.,  256. 

Wilson,   Effingham,   205. 

Wilson,  John,  his  view  of  contem- 
porary poetry,  130,  230,  484, 
490-492;  his  desire  for  praise, 
311-313;  Lockhart  his  mouth- 
piece, 321;  'The  Athenaeum'  on, 
326;  on  the  Poems  of  1830,  212, 
227-243,  284,  401-404,  430;  Lake 
writes  satire  against,  293,  294 ; 
Tennyson's  letter  to,  293,  294; 
on  the  Poems  of  1832,  286,  287; 
later  attacks  on  Tennyson,  465- 
496;  on  Hallam's  reviews  of 
Tennyson,  223,  232,  233;  on 
'Blackwood's',  230,  231;  on 
'Westminster,'  207;  on  Jerdau 
and  the  'Literary  Gazette,'  104; 


on  Pollok,  178;  on  Jeffrey,  178; 
on  Montgomery,  180,  181;  on 
Joanna  Baillie,  470-473,  485; 
on  Wordsworth,  475;  on  Ma- 
caulay,  487,  488;  on  Browning, 
485,  486,  491;  on  Mrs.  Brown- 
ing, 489,  490;  on  Sterling,  483; 
mentioned,  112,  302,  310,  362; 
and  see  To  Christopher  North. 

Wollstoneeraft,   Mary,   537. 

Woolner,  Thomas,  549. 

Wordsworth,  Charles,  82,  158. 

Wordsworth,   Christopher,   154. 

Wordsworth,  William,  his  position 
and  influence,  73,  128-130,  139, 
141,  150,  151,  154,  161,  193,  421, 
475 ;  on  contemporary  poetry, 
134-136;  on  reading  a  volume 
of  small  poems,  126;  friend  of 
Taylor,  173;  on  Montgomery, 
191;  on  Tennyson,  213,  214;  on 
the  sonnet,  219,  220;  attacked 
by  'Blackwood's,'  241;  writes 
for  'The  Tribute,'  270;  the 
Annuals,  257-259;  poetry  no 
pastime,  280;  Tennyson  would 
not  visit  him,  354 ;  in  '  Fraser  's ' 
Gallery,  359;  Poems  of  Early 
and  Late  Years,  390;  the  lau- 
reateship,  508,  569,  570,  575, 
581,  586;  death,  568;  Hare  on, 
68;  Mrs.  Browning  on,  146; 
Taylor  on,  149;  Tennyson  on, 
221,  272;  Sterling  on,  429;  Wil- 
son on,  475,  480,  482,  484; 
Forster  on,  485;  Moxon  on, 
500;  Bulwer  on,  521,  523;  men- 
tioned, 71,  150,  214,  215,  326. 

'Works  of  the  Learned,'  98. 

Wortley,  Lady  Emmeline  Stuart, 
269,  271. 

Wright,  William,  107. 


INDEX 


661 


Xenophon,   47. 

Yon  star  of  eve  so  soft  and  clear, 

44. 
'Yorkshire  Literary  Annual,'  266. 


You  ask  me  why  though  ill  at  ease, 

44. 
You  might  have  won,  11. 
Young,  Edward,  48. 

Z.,  see  Lockhart. 


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